Rob Blackhurst

Leading Article: The country will remain divided as long as Lord Goldsmith's judgement remains secret

Independent, The (London), Mar 1, 2004

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THE GOVERNMENT'S insistence that the Attorney General's justification for war should remain secret has become unsustainable. John Major, no human-rights-loving radical, breached it open wide on Breakfast With Frost yesterday morning when he argued that the country will remain divided as long as Lord Goldsmith's double side of A4 remains for the eyes of the Cabinet only.

Revelations that the Attorney General had warned Blair that the war would be illegal without a second United Nations resolution in January, and changed his mind only within days of the first cruise missile, will lead many to conclude that he buckled under pressure to come up with the right verdict.

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With the Chief of the Defence Staff refusing to commit troops unless he was given a watertight proof that they would not be tried for war crimes in an illegal war, this was no arcane matter of jurisprudence: everything turned on the Attorney General's words. The sudden dropping of all charges on "evidential grounds" against the GCHQ whistle-blower Katharine Gun adds to the suspicion that the case for war was so balsa-thin that the Government does not want it revealed, even if the withdrawal of the case was genuinely motivated by the need to protect intelligence.

The only response now is for the Government to take a deep breath and publish. It may be a constitutional convention that the Attorney General's advice remains secret, but, as The Independent on Sunday pointed out yesterday, the parliamentary rule book, Erskine May, allows for this to broken at the behest of ministers. The last time this happened was in 1971 - hardly the Arcadian past.

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Mr Blair has hardly been a stickler for constitutional niceties or a prisoner of protocol when the occasions has demanded it. Though it was highly unusual for the Government to leak the identity of a civil servant to the press, the Prime Minister agreed to the "naming strategy" of Dr David Kelly out of fear, he claims, that he would be accused of covering up the source of Andrew Gilligan's story. And by setting up the Hutton inquiry, the Prime Minister has established a new norm of openness. We've seen the most intimate whispers in Downing Street corridors revealed that would previously have gathered dust under the 30-year rule. We've even seen - without precedent - raw intelligence revealed in two Downing Street dossiers. For Blair to argue now that a legal judgement - that isn't going to compromise any agents in the field - should be kept secret rings hollow.

Mr Blair's aides may be counselling silence, arguing that the story will burn itself out if the Government sits tight for a few days. Publishing Goldsmith's advice now will mean that the entrails of war will be picked over for months, they claim. The opposite is true.

As long as the advice remains shrouded in secrecy, the Prime Minister will not be able to move on to the schools, hospitals and graffiti initiatives that he claims "real people" are yearning to talk about. The decision to go to war remains an undigested piece of business that is preventing the body-politic from operating normally. And rightly so, because the stakes could not be higher. If MPs had known of Goldsmith's vacillating advice, it is unlikely that Blair would have won his famous Commons victory, British troops would have had to be withdrawn and the Prime Minister would have offered his resignation.

The debate over the past week has been conducted in the courts, in the comment pages of newspapers and on the BBC's Today programme. It is time that it returned to Parliament. The Prime Minister should make a statement to the Commons this week and invite Lord Butler to extend his terms of remit to look at the legal justification for war, as well as his research into what went wrong with the intelligence. Iraq divided the Labour Party and the country more than any foreign policy issue for a generation. There will be no closure, no catharsis, until we know the facts.