The MailOnline’s report came as an opinion poll published by UK polling company YouGov revealed 63 percent of Britons are opposed to Blair being knighted. However, this order was defied and the memo was locked in a safe at the UK’s Ministry of Defence instead.īlair and Powell have previously dismissed these allegations – which first emerged in 2015 – as false. Hoon said his secretary was told “in no uncertain terms” by Jonathan Powell, Blair’s then-chief of staff, that the note was to be destroyed after it had been read, the Daily Mail reported, citing passages from Hoon’s recently published memoir, See How They Run. The site said a former aide of his had in 2003 ordered then-Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to “burn” a memo written by then-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith that said the invasion of Iraq could be illegal.Īt the time, the US and UK had failed to secure a specific UN resolution giving them international backing for the incursion. Late on Tuesday, as the campaign to remove Blair’s knighthood was gathering pace, the UK’s MailOnline news website published resurfaced allegations against Blair. ‘Burn after reading’ Iraq war memo allegation
To justify the invasion, Blair and then-US President George Bush had cast Hussein as a global threat who possessed weapons of mass destruction as Washington, in particular, focused on neutralising supposed threats in the wake of the Septemattacks.īut no such weapons were ever found.
The invasion, which resulted in former President Saddam Hussein’s removal from power and subsequent execution, ushered in years of conflict that saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed as the country descended into chaos. The ex-Labour Party leader, who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007, has faced constant criticism in recent decades over his involvement in the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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