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By Peter Graff
LONDON (Reuters) - The hottest ticket in London is a yellow scrap of paper letting the bearer into court to see Prime Minister Tony Blair fight for his political life.
Scores of people camped overnight on the street hoping to win one of only a handful of courtroom passes to see history being made in the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday.
"We're all here to see Blair squirm," said pensioner Janet Sproule, who arrived by bicycle at dawn in an oilskin coat and was rewarded with ticket number 57.
"Hopefully Blair will tell us how he lied about getting us into the war," she added. "But it won't happen. He's too slick."
When Blair took the stand mid-morning, he became only the second sitting prime minister to be hauled before an independent judicial inquiry.
Senior judge Lord Hutton is inquiring into the death of government scientist David Kelly, who killed himself after he was named as the source for a news story that said Blair's government hyped intelligence to justify war on Iraq.
The hearings have not been broadcast, and the public have had to make do watching actors on television perform reconstructions by reading out the transcript.
Just ahead of Sproule, 21-year-old history student David Vaiani said he had stayed up all night after arriving at the courthouse at 3 a.m.
His jacket and tie were wrinkled, he needed a shave and was "stiff, more than anything" from squatting all night on the pavement. But it was worth it.
"It's an historic day in this country's history," he said, clutching an umbrella -- "just in case" -- and a copy of the Daily Telegraph.
Only the first ten members of the public won seats in the court, but about 70 others were allowed to watch the hearings on closed-circuit TV in a separate room. Scores more were locked out, but waited anyway, just in case.
Outside court the show belonged to demonstrators.
Hundreds of anti-war protesters chanted "Tony Blair -- war criminal!" and brandished placards ridiculing the prime minister as a "most wanted" fugitive from the Wild West.
Some banners morphed Blair's name into "B.Liar" as mud from the Iraq furore threatened to stick to a man elected six years ago as an antidote to the sleaze that helped topple his Conservative predecessor.
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