Say hello to your Iraq fall-guy:

The Bush administration's shake-up of its policymaking structure for Iraq was overshadowed on Wednesday by an admission from the White House that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary in charge of reconstruction, had not been consulted.

Backtracking on the assurances he made at the beginning of the week that Mr Rumsfeld had been 'very involved in this process', Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday: 'Maybe I should not have characterised it that way.'