LONDON, 1 September 2003 — Only the resignation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair can end the government’s much maligned culture of spin, opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith wrote in a newspaper published yesterday.

Analysts believe the resignation Friday of Blair’s most powerful aide, his director of communications and strategy Alastair Campbell, is a chance to finally bury the spin culture — a view clearly not shared by Duncan Smith.

“But now he’s going, let’s not be deceived that his departure... will mean an end to Labour’s culture of spin and deceit,” the Conservative Party leader wrote in The Independent yesterday.

“As Campbell goes — on this I’m absolutely clear — it’s not the resignation of the servant that matters but the departure of his master,” he said.

“The real Downing Street director of communications must go: Tony Blair himself.” Campbell, a 46-year-old former tabloid journalist, was loathed by many members of Parliament and political writers as an unelected, unaccountable “spin doctor”, intensely preoccupied with managing the image of Blair and his center-left Labor administration.

Campbell was one of the original members of Blair’s inner circle who helped steer the Labour Party to two landslide election victories. The Independent yesterday said a new ‘department of truth’ headed by a top-ranking civil servant would be set up following Campbell’s departure.

Blair’s office has already announced that former Labour Party spokesman David Hill will succeed Campbell.

The Mail yesterday said Blair was to order a clear-out of his closest aides, including chief of staff Jonathan Powell and official spokesman Tom Kelly.

Meanwhile, the judicial inquiry into the apparent suicide of Kelly enters its final stages today with what promises to be emotional testimony from the widow of the British weapons scientist.

Janice Kelly is expected to give evidence via video link to avoid an unseemly media circus at the London court where the inquiry headed by Lord Brian Hutton will be going into its fourth and final week.

Kelly, 59, a former UN arms inspector in Iraq, was at the center of allegations that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Yesterday, the Observer newspaper cast Kelly in a new light, publishing what it called an unpublished article he wrote anonymously for a report on Iraq before the US-led war on Iraq began in March.

In it he says that, while Iraq’s arsenal was “modest”, its development under Saddam — and the fear that terrorists could get their hands on it — was serious enough to warrant “regime change”.