Prime Minister's Questions

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BBC News Online political correspondent Nick Assinder gives his instant verdict on prime minister's question time from the House of Commons.

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Horlicks may be a bedtime beverage but it is clearly giving Tony Blair sleepless nights.

Thanks to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's description of Downing Street's "dodgy dossier" on Iraq as a complete Horlicks, the Tories have found a snappy new question time insult to hurl at the prime minister.

And they did it to death during an otherwise flat, end-of-termish question time.

Maybe it's the heat, and maybe it was the inevitable gloom cast by the deaths of soldiers in Iraq.

And maybe it was something more serious - but the prime minister's performance entirely lacked the customary fizz and authority.

Frankly, he looked completely knackered and fed up.

It's probably no surprise for a man who has just gone through two weeks of hell on wheels and who is looking at more to come.

Iain Duncan Smith again failed to capitalise on the prime minister's troubles.

But even so, Tony Blair looked far from triumphant.

He was pinned down on tax by Mr Duncan Smith and handed the Tories a fresh weapon by refusing to rule out future increases in national insurance rates.

And he was firmly on the spot over both documents produced by the government to support the case form war on Iraq, particularly when bayoneted by Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy.

His assertion that they were both accurate raised plenty of eyebrows. It is an assertion that will be tested time and again in coming days and weeks.

These are genuinely testing time for the government in general and the prime minister in particular.

And boy, is it beginning to show.