The Mail on Sunday claimed that before the war on Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, had warned Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a 13-page letter that it was questionable whether Britain could legally attack Iraq under UN Resolution 1441. A nine-paragraph summary of the Attorney General’s advice, containing no such caveat, was later published by the government, but it has refused to publish any fuller advice. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said that Mr Blair had ‘told lies to win elections. And he’s only taken a stand on one thing in the last eight years — taking Britain to war. And he couldn’t even tell the truth about that.’ Mr Brian Sedgemore, who first became a Labour MP in 1974, defected to the Liberal Democrats and urged voters to give Tony Blair ‘a bloody nose’ on polling day; Lord Kinnock, a former leader of the Labour party, said that, for fellow MPs, Mr Sedgemore’s remarks would be ‘a lance right through the spine’. The Royal College of Nursing said in a report that there were 20,588 new entrants to nursing in 2004, but 35,000 home-trained nurses had retired or left, while 12,700 overseas nurses joined the register. Sir John Mills, the actor, died, aged 97. A High Court judge refused an injunction to prevent publication in the News of the World of claims by Miss Abbie Gibson, who had worked as a nanny for Mr and Mrs David Beckham, about strains in their marriage and of a relationship between the footballer and his wife’s former beautician. AQA, one of the three main GCSE examination boards, is to scan 500,000 papers and email them for marking in India, where examiners command much lower payments. A window fell from the 28th floor of the ‘Gherkin’ building in St Mary Axe in the City of London.
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