Channel 4 News at 25: Cathy Newman
Updated on 01 November 2007
Our scoop on the Attorney General's report sent Fleet Street into a frenzy, as politics correspondent Cathy Newman remembers.
It was a heart-stopping moment. I was Chief Political Correspondent of the Financial Times at the time and when, on 27 April 2005, Jon brandished the Attorney General's top secret advice on the legality of the Iraq war live on Channel 4 News, it sent Fleet Street into a frenzy.
We'd all been trying desperately for months to get hold of it, and the government had been trying equally desperately to suppress it.
It had even been kept from the cabinet. Now, just eight days before the general election, Channel 4 News had it - exclusively.
Like every national newspaper, the FT's first edition was torn up and the entire paper remade to report on this sensational leak. All because, as many journalists had suspected all along, the Attorney General's private advice to the prime minister on the war bore little resemblance to his eventual published advice - which formed the legal basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Full of caveats about the pros and cons of war and the legal risk of sending troops in, the original document also stressed the importance of securing a second UN resolution to authorise military action - something the Blair government never succeeded in doing.
So as Jon said when he held the Attorney General's advice aloft: "This is it!"
And what a scoop it was.
Watch the report that rocked Fleet Street here.
Read the background here.
