By: Tim Shipman July 01 2010

Tony Blair’s fury at being told the Iraq War was illegal was laid bare yesterday after secret memos from his Attorney General were finally published.

In an unprecedented move, the Chilcot Inquiry into the conflict published Lord Goldsmith’s warnings to the then Prime
Minister, the first time a government has ever declassified legal advice to ministers.

They detail how time and again the Attorney General told Mr Blair he risked taking the UK into an unlawful war – and
the Prime Minister’s irritation and refusal to accept that fact.


Assurances: Jonathan Powell, pictured with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, told a meeting at No.10 that the UK would not support a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq without U.N. support


In one damning letter to Mr Blair dated January 30, 2003 – less than two months before the invasion – Lord Goldsmith told him that UN resolution 1441, on which the government came to rely, ‘does not authorise the use of military force’.
Mr Blair scrawled in the margin of the letter: ‘I just don’t understand this.’

The same document exposes the huge irritation in Downing Street at the Attorney General’s reluctance to give the green light for an invasion.

No 10 aide Matthew Rycroft made clear that Lord Goldsmith’s missive was unwelcome.

‘[We] specifically said we did not need further advice [on] this matter,’ he wrote.

The word ‘not’ was underlined. A series of documents, minutes and memos make clear that Lord Goldsmith came under huge pressure to change his views and was unceremoniously excluded from Cabinet discussions in the build-up to the conflict.

Lord Goldsmith warned Mr Blair as early as July 2002 that war would not be legal without the express approval of the United Nations Security Council.

In a memo to the Prime Minister, who had already asked the military to prepare war plans, he warned that Britain would not be able to justify war by claiming ‘self defence’ or a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’
in Iraq.

Even after resolution 1441 was passed in November 2002, declaring Saddam Hussein in breach of previous UN demands that he disarm, the Attorney General maintained that a second resolution explicitly authorising war was necessary.

In October that year, as the wording of 1441 was being prepared, the Attorney General gave a stark warning to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that Mr Blair had gone too far in pledging support to President George W. Bush.

A record of their telephone call says: ‘The Attorney explained that he was concerned by reports he had received that the Prime Minister had indicated to President Bush that he would join them in acting without a second Security Council decision.’

He also told Mr Straw the government must not promise ‘the U.S. government that it can do things which the Attorney considers to be unlawful’.


In a sign of the pressure he was coming under, ‘the Foreign Secretary suggested the Attorney might not wish to commit himself on paper until he had seen the Prime Minister’.

This resulted in an arm-twisting meeting that was then arranged by Mr Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell.

The Attorney General also complained that he ‘ought to be present’ when the war was being discussed.

But in the final days before the conflict, he changed his tune and declared that a case could be made that Resolution 1441 reactivated the earlier resolutions authorising force during the first Gulf War.

His final legal advice, couched with caveats, was never shown in full to the Cabinet, who only saw the same brief summary declaring the war to be legal.

Source: Mail Online.co.uk