This position did not change but simply hardened up as a result of the events and deliberations which took place between 7 – 17 March.

So there was no significant difference between the advice given on the 7 and 17 March as you claim. If there is any gloss or spin on this matter I think it is coming mainly from your side.

In this case the real point is whether the Attorney General was convinced that there was a lawful basis for the use of force in Iraq without a second UN resolution. The Cabinet Office’s Disclosure Statement (which incidentally is a masterly exposition of how the decision was made) clearly shows that he was convinced and Lord Goldsmith has repeatedly confirmed this personally.

Of course there was widespread consultation with all interested parties before the decision was taken (Lord Goldsmith would have been failing in his duty if he had not done this) but such consultation doesn’t necessarily mean he was leaned on. As with all conspiracy theories any innocent action can be made to look sinister if you try hard enough. Certainly Goldsmith may have been INFLUENCED by what had been said to him but surely that’s what a consultation exercise is all about. Being influenced is not at all the same thing as being “leaned on” with all its Mafia-type connotations.

As for changing his mind, what lawyer has not changed his mind when considering complex issues of law. However, reading through the Disclosure Statement there is no indication that Lord Goldsmith “had been invited to change his mind” or that he had actually changed his mind. There is only an earlier reference to “the safest course”. being to have a second resolution. This was obviously advised as a “belt and braces” approach given the legal and particularly political challenges expected. A “belt and braces” approach does not imply you think your trousers will fall down without both being in place. In this context it was simply about avoiding fuss.

When it became apparent that a second resolution would not be forthcoming the military naturally wanted a clear view on whether the case stood up without it, which the Attorney-General duly delivered.. To argue that this represented pressure by the military to make him change his mind is absurd.

Likewise I see nothing sinister in Goldsmith putting his name to a document which his legal team had helped him to draw up. That’s the way things are normally done in legal and other organisations.

Nor do I see anything particularly untoward in that meeting at No.10. The Disclosure Statement says this was simply for the Attorney General to report his findings. As someone who has worked with lawyers in the past that seems to be reasonable enough to me. I frequently had such meetings Indeed I sometimes challenged the lawyers’ conclusions if they were not to my liking but that did not mean I was leaning on them to produce something that they knew to be illegal.

Finally I totally agree with you that the Inquiry should look at evidence rather than mere unsubstantiated assertions (which litter the case against the war) and denials (which tend to be related to the case for the war). However, I hope you will agree with me that when someone denies he or she was leaned on when coming to a decision this can only be proved otherwise by clear evidence that he or she was threatened in some way (as opposed to just being asked to take certain things into account, which is a normal part of the deliberative process). In the absence of such evidence, such allegations should be consigned to the dustbin.

The main reason that this comment misses the point of the site is that it invites us to accept the attorney general’s denial as fact. There is indeed significant evidence to the contrary but, more importantly, there is unpublished evidence that the Inquiry should look at. One of the purposes of this site is to argue that this Inquiry should not merely ask those accused of wrongdoing whether they did wrong and then accept their denials. If it did this, it would indeed be a waste of time and rightly condemned as a farce and an establishment cover up. In this context, the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith is implicitly accused of wrongdoing in that he should not have given in to any pressure so that to have done so would have been to have done wrong.
It is worth observing that officials accused of giving in to pressure tend to deny it after the fact. It does them no good to admit it. An almost exact parallel can be found in Lord Hutton’s acceptance of JIC chairman John Scarlett’s claim that he was not pressured to strengthen the claims in the September 2002 dossier, in spite of clear evidence that he was. During the hearings, Scarlett admitted that the view expressed in this email http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/cab/cab_11_0025to0026.pdf “Think we’re in a lot of trouble with this as it stands now” was put to him at a meeting http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/cab/cab_11_0028.pdf on the same evening. It also emerged this year that a senior Cabinet Office official had invited Scarlett to drop caveats from the dossier. see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/13/iraq-documents-cabinet-office
The only reasonable conclusion from this is that a denial from an official that he or she was leaned on is almost entirely worthless.
This brings us very nicely to Goldsmith. The government eventually admitted that his unequivocal advice of 17/3/03 was different from the lengthy equivocal advice of ten days earlier. According to the government’s own version of events, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5017872.stm Goldsmith was invited to change his mind because his initial advice was too equivocal for the chief of the defence staff:
“On 12 March, the Legal Adviser to the Ministry of Defence wrote to the Legal Secretary to the Law Officers, following up on the Chief of the Defence Staff’s comments the previous day. In that letter the MoD Legal Adviser recorded that he had informed the CDS that ‘if the Attorney General has advised that he is satisfied that the proposed military action by the UK would be in accordance with national and international law, [the CDS] can properly give his order committing UK forces’ … The Attorney General recognised therefore that he needed to indicate his clear view as to whether military action would be lawful ”
So the chief of the defence staff tells the attorney general that if he does not change his mind, the policy that – as the attorney well knows – the prime minister has been pursuing for the past year will have to be abandoned. That is clear evidence of pressure, whatever Goldsmith says.
Also, according to the government’s own version of events, Goldsmith then met Sally Morgan from Tony Blair’s office and Lord Falconer on 13 March 2003, the very day he changed his mind. In the first place, there has to be a question of what the purpose of the meeting was and how appropriate it was. Why was Falconer, a junior minister with no legal role, meeting the attorney general?
The government claimed that Goldsmith had already changed his mind earlier that day but it has since emerged that there was no material evidence to support this. see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/13/iraq-iraq
But, even accepting the government’s chronology, between changing his mind on 13 March and publishing his unequivocal advice on the 17th, Goldsmith met Morgan and Falconer. What does the note of this meeting say? It is not clear that there is one. In the absence of evidence, other than evidence of a meeting that is highly inappropriate, why should anyone accept an assertion from Goldsmith that “neither Baroness Morgan of Huyton nor Lord Falconer of Thoroton, nor any official in the Prime Minister’s office had any involvement whatever in the drafting of the answer”?
Indeed, Goldsmith has admitted that his one-page answer was a team effort: “”The written answer of 17 March 2003 was drawn up in my office. Those involved were myself, the Solicitor General, two officials in my office, three officials from the Foreign and Commonwealth office, and Christopher Greenwood QC. The draft was also discussed with the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg. I was fully involved throughout the drafting process and personally finalised, and of course approved, the answer.” In these circumstances, the opinion is only Goldsmith’s to the extent that he put his name to it. As with Scarlett, the question of who influenced him and to what extent along the way remains open. If one simply accepts that if a person asserts that a view was his own, independent view you have to discard all evidence that others sought to influence him during the time that he changed his mind, you may as well not bother looking into the issue. Hopefully, the Inquiry will look at evidence rather than mere unsubstantiated assertions and denials.

As for that erroneous attribution to Tony Blair of the legal advice given on March 17 2003 (due I think to a reference to it in one of Tony Blair’s
subsequent Parliamentary answers), this was not a Freudian slip as you imply. Lord Goldsmith has strongly denied he was leaned upon in any way, in Parliament, in the media, and to the Butler inquiry. There is no material evidence to the contrary and if this website is truly about being a search for the truth I hope it will eschew this and future conspiracy theories of this nature,

Jess the Dog repeats that dog-eared canard beloved of anti-war protestors that Tony Blair took us to war on a lie. In fact it is this assertion that has always been the lie. As I said in my piece the actual casus belli was not Saddam’s proven possession of WMD but his serial non-compliance with UN resolutions calling on him to DEMONSTRATE (not just declare) that he no longer had them. In other words the onus was on him to prove he didn’t have WMD not on the coalition to prove that he did. The fact that he didn’t do this (for his own reasons)represented a clear breach of these resolutions, which were passed btw under an article of the UN Charter wh allowing a military response. So Tony Blair went to war on a fact not a lie.

Andrew, I will respond to your articles(s)on the pages where they’re posted. Suffice to say here that I agree with you about the complexity of the issues but I see in this the risk of not seeing the wood for the trees. My piece was essentially about describing the wood, the over-all considerations that may have prompted the decision to go to war. With respect, I think your piece(s) seems to be mainly about the minutaie of these considerations which can tend to obfuscate the broad thrust of the argument and at worst can lapse into a nitpicking critique of what the allies did and a self-selecting apologia of Saddam’s actions.

Due to the complexity of the issues raised and the availability of time available it will take me a number of postings to complete the response.

I will endeavour to do this as quickly as is reasonably possible.

There may not have been widespread objection to a war with the expressed aim of the removal of Saddam Hussein, but that was not the war that was launched. The war that was launched was because of a stated WMD threat. This was a lie, and this is the critical point.