Liberal Democrat Shadow Foreign Secretary, Edward Davey says: “Michael Wood’s statement is the final nail in the coffin of the case for a legal war. We need to know just who saw this advice. Did it reach Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? And if not, why not?

“This startling revelation suggests Tony Blair, Jack Straw and probably Gordon Brown knew the war was illegal and may have deliberately and knowingly misled Parliament and the public. This puts Labour’s leadership squarely in the dock.

“Blair and Brown must be closely interrogated on this when they appear before Chilcot.”

Ed Davey was commenting on the statement of Michael Wood, the FCO’s legal adviser from 2001-06, that: ‘I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law’, and ‘[I] did not agree with the position, stated in the Parliamentary Answer of 17 March 2003 and the paper of the same date entitled “Iraq: Legal Basis for the Use of Force”, that SCRs 678, 687 and 1441, read together, amounted to such authorization,’