Prime Minister Tony Blair faces the toughest week of six years in power, with a party revolt over higher education policy and a judge set to report on the British government?s role in the suicide of a top arms expert.

Blair faces what has been dubbed ?24 hours from hell? on Tuesday and Wednesday ? starting with a rebellion in his Labour party over plans to make students pay more for university.

Rebels accuse Blair of reneging on a pre-election promise and of betraying Labour?s traditional egalitarian values.

After the prospect of losing a parliamentary vote over the issue, Blair will have to deal with Lord Hutton?s long-awaited report on the death of government scientist David Kelly, an expert in Iraqi weapons.

Asked by Sunday?s Observer newspaper if he would still be leading the country by the end of the week, Blair said: ?I have every intention of doing that, yes.?

?I think in this job you spend the entire time at risk, so there is not a moment when you are not,? he added.

Kelly committed suicide after being revealed as the source for a BBC journalist?s report last year that Blair?s team inflated the threat posed by Iraq, to justify the war launched to oust President Saddam Hussein.

Blair?s government has been accused of contributing to Kelly?s death by leaking his name to the media. Blair has denied personal responsibility, but if the judge finds otherwise he could be forced to quit.

Blair, who led the Labour party from the political wilderness to two landslide election victories, said he saw Hutton?s findings as a test of his integrity as Prime Minister. ?The issue vis-a-vis my integrity is: did we receive the intelligence and was it properly relayed to people? And obviously I believe that we did,? Blair said. In the build-up to the Hutton report?s publication, Blair has faced a barrage of criticism over his stance on weapons of mass destruction. The debate has badly bruised his popularity in polls and his trust ratings have plummeted.

Bruised but not beaten

David Kay, stepping down on Friday as head of the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) searching for weapons after the ousting of Saddam, said he had concluded Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical arms.

But Blair stuck to his position that weapons of mass destruction would eventually be discovered, prompting snorts of protest from his critics. Robin Cook, a former Foreign Secretary who quit a senior government post during the run-up to the war launched last March, said Blair was ?behaving in a way which had a missionary zeal, an evangelical certainty?.

?It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along, when everybody can now see he was wrong.?

Opposition Conservative Michael Ancram, whose party had backed Blair over the war, said: ?There are very serious questions as to why Tony Blair told us not only before the war but after the war that he believed he had evidence of weapons of mass destruction.? In the build-up to Blair?s crunch week, British Sunday newspapers were full of headlines like ?High Noon? and ?Blitzed?. But a Reuters poll of 18 political analysts predicted that Blair would end the week bruised, but not beaten. ?I think it?s going to damage him, but not fatally,? said David Carlton at the University of Warwick.

Paul MAJENDIE