IT was meant to be a bad week for the Prime Minister. It has turned out to be a pretty awful one for Michael Howard.

The day after scraping home in the Commons vote on tuition fees, Tony Blair has been exonerated by Lord Hutton over the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

As we said yesterday, the Prime Minister has been damaged by the rebellion over tuition fees. There was an arrogance which led to inadequate consultation, and come the next election, it will be remembered that this Government broke a manifesto promise.

With that election perhaps 18 months away, the people of this country will soon get the chance to decide whether Labour's next manifesto is worth the paper it is written on.

Although the Hutton inquiry's condemnation has been chiefly aimed at the BBC, it has also been a damaging process for the Government in that it brought into sharper focus the doubts over the Government's justification for the war against Iraq.

But, for all those remaining doubts, Mr Blair has now been unequivocally cleared of lying over the naming of David Kelly and that must be shouted loud and clear.

Having accused Mr Blair of being a liar, Mr Howard yesterday failed to do the honourable thing and accept Lord Hutton's vindication of the Prime Minister with an apology.

Instead, his response to the report was muddled, half-hearted and unjust. The accusation that the Tory leader was in "hiding" last night after pulling out of a television interview, does not look good.

Neither does the fact that Mr Howard - for all his party's criticism of Mr Blair's essentially Conservative route forward on the underfunding of universities - does not have a policy to call his own.

So we approach the end of this most testing of weeks in the House of Commons with Tony Blair having been bruised but nowhere near as badly damaged as had been anticipated.

For Michael Howard, however, it could have been so much better.