Tony Blair’s opponents are still recycling myths about the Iraq war

The former prime minister’s knighthood has prompted the rehashing of a 20-year-old story from the memoir of Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time of the invasion, writes John Rentoul

Geoff Hoon with Tony Blair at the 2003 Labour conference (PA)

For nearly 20 years now the Daily Mail has been spinning the thinnest of recycled material in its campaign against Tony Blair over the Iraq war – a military campaign that at the time it cautiously supported.

Today’s instalment, a front-page lead story headlined, “Ex-minister: Blair’s aide told me to burn Iraq war advice”, is an ingenious use of a book published two months ago, which recounted a story reported seven years ago, referring to a document published 17 years ago, to try to generate more clicks for an online petition against Blair’s knighthood.

Today’s story reports the account given by Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time of the Iraq war, in his memoir, See How They Run, published in November. He was sent a copy of the legal advice given by Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general, just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. When his principal private secretary asked Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, what to do with the document after Hoon had read it, Hoon said he was told to “burn it”.

This was first reported by the Mail on Sunday seven years ago, in even more colourful terms. In 2015, the Mail on Sunday reported that the document “said the war was illegal”, which it did not. Lord Goldsmith’s advice, which was leaked on the eve of the 2005 election in an attempt to damage Blair, was that military action was lawful in his opinion, but he expressed concern that the decision might be challenged in the British courts. Today’s Daily Mail story is more carefully worded, saying that the memo said the war “could be illegal”, which is not the language the attorney general used.

We now know, nearly two decades later, that Lord Goldsmith’s fears were unfounded. No legal action against the Iraq decision – recommended by Blair but taken by cabinet and parliament – has been successfully started. The attorney general’s opinion, that military action was lawful, was correct. Some people use legal language to express their opposition to the decision, but there is no court in which their view can be tried. When Kofi Annan, UN secretary general, called it an illegal war, he meant that it was contrary to the UN charter but that is a matter of opinion rather than law.

In his memoir, Hoon said the opposite of what the Daily Mail reports. Hoon said: “The attorney general had decided that invading Iraq would be lawful if the prime minister believed that it was in the UK’s national interest to do so.” He commented: “It was not exactly the ringing legal endorsement that the chief of the defence staff was looking for.”

In fact, the advice caused consternation not just in the Ministry of Defence but in No 10 at the time. While Blair was relieved that Lord Goldsmith had changed his previous opinion that military action would be unlawful, he had done so in such a hedged and equivocal way that the opponents of the war would have seized on his comments that the position was “unclear” and that the “safest legal course” would be to secure a further UN resolution – an attempt that was about to be abandoned.

Lord Goldsmith was then persuaded that he needed to provide the cabinet and the military with a shorter document providing clarity on the question of the lawfulness of military action, which he did 10 days later on a single sheet of paper, saying explicitly: “The authority to use force under resolution 678 has revived and so continues today.”

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As for the instruction to “burn” the longer, equivocal document, Powell has denied saying it. I assumed that if he had said it, it would have been a darkly humorous way of emphasising how sensitive the document was, as copies would obviously have been retained by No 10 and the attorney general. In any case, the document was published long ago and anyone can read what it says.

What I found more interesting about Hoon’s well written and engaging memoir was the part immediately after the story of the legal advice. Hoon recounts how, in the days before the invasion of Iraq, he dined alone in the Ministry of Defence’s temporary canteen: “I fell into conversation with the only other person eating there at the time. He didn’t introduce himself but said that he knew Iraq and that we were doing the right thing by invading and bringing down Saddam Hussein … He did not specifically tell me that he had been a UN weapons inspector, even though it was very clear from his words that he knew in detail what he was talking about in relation to Iraq and its various weapons programmes.” It was only later that Hoon learned from David Kelly’s wife and daughters that “he had gone home that night and told them that he had had a long conversation with the secretary of state about Iraq”.

That would seem to me a more valuable insight into how the case for war in Iraq was complicated and balanced than rehashing a lot of Blair-hating myths.