Will We Learn of the “Many Dark Actors”?

Anyone who has been following over the last eight years will not be surprised that Lord Goldsmith told Tony Blair that the Iraq War was illegal.

On July 29, [2002, Lord Goldsmith] wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, ‘Dear Tony’, and signed by hand, ‘Yours, Peter’.

In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:

• War could not be justified purely on the grounds of ‘regime change’.
• Although United Nations rules permitted ‘military intervention on the basis of self-defence’, they did not apply in this case because Britain was not under threat from Iraq.
• While the UN allowed ‘humanitarian intervention’ in certain instances, that too was not relevant to Iraq.
• It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.

Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying ‘the situation might change’ – although in legal terms, it never did.

I’m more interested, though, in the description of the scrum two Labour officials used to to convince Goldsmith to give the Iraq War some legal sanction.

He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair’s senior Labour ‘fixer’ in Downing Street. No officials were present.

A source said: ‘Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.’

After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.

With this stuff coming out during the Iraq War inquiry, I honestly wonder whether we’ll eventually learn about the “dark actors playing games” who went after David Kelly.