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 Deputy Prime Minister, was being chased from a press conference by a 
 reporter brandishing a copy of the advice and shouting: 'Do you want 
 this? You haven't read it.' 
  
 The farce overshadowed the unfortunate fact that the full 13-page 
 legal advice did not prove Howard's central charge. Admittedly, 
 Goldsmith's conclusion, in paragraph 28, that 'a reasonable case can 
 be made' for war without a second UN resolution was well short of a 
 ringing endorsement, but neither did he say the war was unlawful. 
 Blair had not lied when he said the Attorney General had ruled the war 
 legal in the end - although he had omitted to mention that the 
 definitive verdict was certainly not there as late as 7 March. 
  
 By the time Blair took the podium in the basement of the financial 
 wire service Bloombergs' City office on Thursday morning, ostensibly 
 to launch the party's business manifesto, it was clear there would be 
 few questions about corporation tax. Blair angrily dismissed the 
 leaked document as a 'damp squib': asked why, in that case, it 
 shouldn't be published in full, he startled the audience by announcing 
 it might as well since 'you have probably got it all anyway'. 
  
 But the crucial intervention came not from Blair, but from the man 
 beside him. Asked if he, too, would have gone to war in Blair's 
 position, Gordon Brown responded with a succinct: 'Yes.' The 
 spontaneous applause came not from the bemused audience of 
 businessmen, but from relieved Labour aides. Brown had passed up a 
 golden chance to make personal capital out of the war - even though he 
 could hardly have done otherwise in public. Hewitt, sharing the 
 platform, could not resist exclaiming: 'Well done.' 
  
 Help also came from an unexpected source. At his morning press 
 conference, Howard was asked whether - given the same legal advice - 
 he, too, would have invaded, he confirmed he would. The logic of his 
 position was crumbling. 
  
 On Thursday night, as the three leaders submitted to the David 
 Dimbleby treatment on Question Time , Howard went still further, 
 confirming he would have gone to war knowing there was no WMD. Saddam 
 was still a threat, he said, and he favoured 'regime change-plus' - 
 words anti-war voters love to hate. 
  
 When Howard asked the Question Time audience how many people thought 
 Blair had told the truth on Iraq, few hands shot up. And yet his 
 decision to 'go negative' on Blair's character now looks like an own 
 goal: a Populus poll yesterday showed that almost half of voters were 
 less likely to vote Tory as a result. Whatever people think of Blair, 
 they apparently don't want to hear it from Howard. 
  
 The danger for Labour, however, comes not just from Howard. Charles 
 Kennedy's stance on Iraq already puts him in pole position for 
 anti-war votes: his mission now is to vacuum up floating voters, 
 particularly women, who hate not the war, but the playground 
 shrillness of debate about it. 
  
 His trick of hovering statesmanlike over the fray - Kennedy has 
 criticised both Howard's choice of language and Blair's angry 
 dismissal of the legal advice as a 'damp squib' - may be trickier to 
 maintain given his own party's latest election broadcast, which 
 caricatures the Prime Minister as the boy who cried wolf over WMD. But 
 in about half a dozen seats, such as Islington South or Hornsey and 
 Wood Green in London, Labour strategists admit that the furore over 
 the legal advice could be enough to swing them Kennedy's way. 
  
 No wonder one minister, in a seat way down the Tories' hit list, is 
 now writing two speeches for election night, one for winning and one 
 for losing: 'It's undoubtedly close. Iraq, Blair and council tax are 
 the three issues that keep coming up, and the answers I'm giving are 
 not the sort that people want to hear.' 
  
 Others on the front line, however, insist that minds are already made 
 up about the war, legal advice or no legal advice. 'If people are 
 going to [vote against me] on the war, they tend to have been very 
 definite from the start,' says one experienced Labour MP fighting a 
 stiff Lib Dem challenge. 'They have had a couple of years to think 
 about it, after all.' 
  
 There is, of course, an incentive for Labour to exaggerate the danger: 
 if the election looks 'in the bag', as Alastair Campbell did not quite 
 say last week, reluctant supporters will not bother to vote. A growing 
 number of ministers are now arguing for an extended diet of humble 
 pie, even if Labour is returned with a healthy majority. There must, 
 they argue, be no triumphalism, and not just over Iraq: too many 
 voters are angry and disillusioned about issues ranging from public 
 services to immigration. 
  
 'If we get back with a reduced majority, we cannot have a scintilla of 
 arrogance: he's got to show he's clocked it,' says one senior 
 minister. Sedgemore's claims this weekend, in a GMTV interview, that 
 'hundreds' of MPs are poised to turn on the leader after the election 
 are exaggerated, but his own mini-revolt is only one of several being 
 planned on the left once the election is over. 
  
 There are threats of a stalking horse candidate running against Blair 
 if he refuses to resign forthwith: Bob Marshall Andrews MP, the 
 maverick left-winger, has publicly spoken of 'serious movements' to 
 change the leader. A string of left-wing MPs, dutifully silent during 
 the election, are planning speeches in the first two weeks of May, 
 calling for a radical change of direction for the party. 
  
 Nonetheless, the threat of a revolt has been lessened by Brown and 
 Blair's campaign rapprochement - and, in a shrunken parliamentary 
 party, it may be uphill work to find the 82 MPs' signatures necessary 
 for a coup. A majority of anything over 50, and Blair is probably 
 safe: winning fewer than 209 seats, and Howard is not. But even a 
 halved majority would rattle nerves. 
  
 One Blairite minister gloomily predicts 'a bloodbath' after polling 
 day, as recriminations are traded between Brown and Blair camps for 
 lost seats: 'This is the calm before the storm. I may be wrong, but 
 I'm worried it will be the two sides back at it again.' 
  
 The young woman who stepped into Tony Blair's path as he finished his 
 whirlwind tour of a nursing home in Risley, Northamptonshire, on 
 Friday afternoon was nervous but emphatic. 'I just wanted to say, 
 don't rise to the bait,' she told him, adding that she didn't want to 
 get political but was upset by the tone of the Tory campaign. 
  
 Blair must now hope that Iraq, for all the damage it has done in the 
 past week, is now finished business, at least for the rest of the 
 campaign. 
  
 Today's revelations of the American meetings, the anger of Boyce and 
 the faltering Labour lead in the polls will ensure that those around 
 Blair continue to bite their nails as the last 96 hours of the 
 campaign hove into view. Four days to go - four days during which 
 Britain's longest serving Labour Prime Minister will wonder, as he 
 races from town to town, speech to speech, interview to interview, if 
 the result on 6 May is really in the bag. 
  
 ~        Guardian Unlimited ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 
  
 ============================== Article no. 5 ============================== 
  
 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1474276,00.html 
  
 British military chief reveals new legal fears over Iraq war 
 by Antony Barnett and Martin Bright 
  
 Sunday May 1, 2005 
 Observer (London) 
  
 The man who led Britain's armed forces into Iraq has said that Tony 
  
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