The Attorney General should not have a veto on military action

Telegraph

6 hours ago

The role of the attorney general has always been a curious hybrid: part-jurist, part-politician. He is the government's foremost legal advisor but also a member of the political Cabinet. He is not one of the thousands of anonymous (and apolitical, at least on paper) Civil Service lawyers offering cautious legal guidance behind closed doors. No, the attorney general is, or ought to be, someone who understands the weight of democratic mandate, who sits at the Cabinet table not just to interpret the law but to help the elected government navigate it in service of the people's will.
This role, by its nature, requires a certain dexterity: legal acumen, certainly, but also political courage. Some attorneys general have leaned heavily into the legal: aloof, abstracted, priestly. Others, more controversially, have seen their political duty as primary: a jurist who bends with the winds of popular sovereignty. I count myself unapologetically in the latter camp. I saw my role as AG as elected representative first, bound by my promise to the people and my party. My duty was to provide lawful pathways, not legalistic roadblocks, to implement the prime minister's democratic agenda.
But what we have now in the present Attorney General is something quite different: a Whitehall legalist who appears to have mistaken his office for a courtroom and forgotten that he serves in Cabinet, not from chambers in Lincoln's Inn. He behaves not as the attorney to the Government but as a robed inquisitor, as a champion of international law in its most unrooted, abstract, and often contradictory form.
This is not just about his conflicts with Cabinet colleagues. We're now in the territory of deliberate obstruction: policy sabotage masquerading as legal rectitude. From attempting to reshape the constitutional role of First Treasury Counsel by installing an ideological legal inner circle, to smearing those of us who are ECHR sceptics as 'Nazis ', he is transforming the Law Officers' Department into a vehicle for Left-wing judicial activism.
The consequences are already dire. Most recently, it is reported that the Attorney General has moved to block Britain from joining the US in potential military action in Iran. This, allegedly, on legal grounds.
Of course, the legal dimension matters. No serious person would argue otherwise. But law in this context is not absolute; it is interpretive. And when the Attorney General starts using legal advice as a veto on foreign policy, overriding the collective wisdom of Cabinet, the intelligence agencies, the military, and elected ministers, then the tail has started wagging the dog.
To be clear, under international law, military force is permissible in narrow circumstances: UN Security Council authorisation, host-state consent, or collective self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. In 2018, we invoked the doctrine of humanitarian intervention to justify strikes in Syria. There is precedent, there is scope, and there is nuance.
Looking at Iran's sustained aggression; its funding and arming of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and a constellation of Shiite militias across the region; its direct attacks on Israeli civilians and cities; its escalating nuclear programme with range capabilities stretching to the UK, it is entirely arguable that collective self-defence is not just viable, but urgent.
And yet, we are told that the Attorney General finds this too fraught: too difficult. That under no circumstances could UK participation include striking Iran itself. This, while Iranian missiles crash into civilian neighbour-hoods, rockets rain down on hospitals and innocent Israelis are killed. It would be comic if it weren't so dangerous. To tie the hands of government in the face of tyranny is not moral clarity; it is moral cowardice dressed in judicial robes.
This Attorney General is not elected. He, personally, holds no democratic mandate. Yet his advice – shaded, it seems, by a particular worldview that sees Western action as the problem and our enemies as misunderstood – is now shaping the limits of Britain's global standing. If the Prime Minister chooses to follow such counsel blindly, we risk becoming spectators to history rather than participants in its making.
In moments of crisis, the question is not simply 'Is this legal?' but also 'Is this right, necessary, and proportionate?' Good legal advice answers all four questions, not just one in isolation.
Right now, Britain's voice on the world stage is being stifled by a cautious legalism that views foreign policy through the rearview mirror. The Attorney General's role is not to moralise, but to advise. It is the Prime Minister who must decide.
History will not forgive us for dithering while our allies act. Nor will it forgive those who mistook paralysis for principle. The attorney general is supposed to safeguard the law, not sanctify it at the expense of sovereignty, security, and strategic clarity.
If this Attorney General cannot understand that, then perhaps he is in the wrong job.