Iraq inquiry: a corker of a declassified document

Interesting papers on the Iraq legal opinion released by the coalition government – there was a long fruitless struggle to get them from the last government.

There’s a corker of a letter from the attorney general to the PM on 30 January 2003 – the day before the PM and President Bush sit in the White House and Bush tells Blair the war starts in March and Blair tells Bush we’ll be with you.

But this letter says war would be illegal without a second resolution. Sir David Manning has written at the top “clear advice from attorney on need for further resolution – DM 31/1” and the heading “Prime Minister to see” which has a tick through it.

No. 10 aide Matthew Rycroft has written “specifically said we did not [underlined] need further advice this week – Matthew 31/1.”

And there scribbled on the side as well is marginalia from the boss himself, T Blair. “I just don’t understand this,” he has written, next to the attorney general’s statement that war would be unlawful without another UN resolution.

You get the impression the attorney felt he was being treated with a certain amount of contempt. The minutes of the chat between Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Lord Goldsmith, then attorney general, from 18 October 2002 also give a similar flavour.

The attorney general is “very troubled” by the way the PM was going about telling President Bush that we’d be shoulder to shoulder with the Americans even though he knew the attorney thought war without a second UN resolution would be “unlawful.”

The attorney says he really should not be excluded from meetings about the war. Not quite the tone you got from the oral evidence Lord G gave. And these are documents, by the way, which Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell had previously refused to publish. His letter to the inquiry insists he’s changed his mind because of his own reflections (and so not because of the change of government).