The Sketch: Straw gets Short shrift over legal advice for war

One of the better spoonerisms on Iraq came a couple of Prime Minister's Questions ago. Tony Blair declared: "The law was warful!" Law is warful all right, when the legislators decide they want to go to war. We complain about how awful the lawlessness of the warfulness is, but is there any point?

One of the better spoonerisms on Iraq came a couple of Prime Minister's Questions ago. Tony Blair declared: "The law was warful!" Law is warful all right, when the legislators decide they want to go to war. We complain about how awful the lawlessness of the warfulness is, but is there any point?

Oh, I think so, and not just for the exercise. The more we complain, maybe the less contemptuously they'll think about behaving next time.

Dominic Grieve was up with an Urgent Question about the Attorney General's advice. Mr Grieve looks like Mr Punch. He packs quite a punch too, and Judy Straw took it on the chin.

The story so far: a Foreign Office legal officer resigned and her resignation letter has now come to light, uncensored for the first time. She reveals that the Attorney General changed his mind twice - once, we can work out now, after a meeting with Charlie Falconer and Sally Morgan from No 10.

He denies having been leant on, but the circumstantial evidence stacks up. Douglas Hogg summed up the prosecution case, describing the Attorney General as "a good house lawyer" and his advice as "providing legal cover for a decision already taken for reasons other than those stated".

How strong need the evidence be to convict the Attorney General? It's not beyond reasonable doubt he's guilty. On the balance of probabilities you might feel he probably is. But the "reasonable suspicion" is that he was certainly leant on. This last level of proof is how the Government prefers to judge others, as the recent terror Bill indicated, so let it be the way they are judged themselves.

Claire Short called Mr Straw a liar from the floor of the House. That doesn't happen every day. Not audibly. Mr Straw said the Attorney General had given his legal advice to Cabinet and took questions on it. Ms Short (who was there at the time) burst out: "He did not take questions! That's not true!"

She also suggested the Cabinet had been misled and thereby Parliament had been misled. The Attorney General "as a reliable part of our constitution was in doubt", she said. A number of questioners suggested the affair was corrosive of trust in government. Their remedy was to publish all the advice. Then no one would ask any longer what material facts changed to cause the Attorney General to change his mind.

Mr Straw's answer to this has changed over time. When Owen Bennett Jones, a reporter for the World Service, questioned Mr Straw on the subject during a recorded interview the Foreign Secretary said: "I'm not fucking answering these fucking stupid questions." He said the same in the House yesterday, although the phrasing was perhaps less spontaneous.

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