Chilcot Inquiry: French Ambassador

Chilcot inquiry: French ambassador contradicts Labour ministers' evidence

Maurice Gourdault-Montagne says Jacques Chirac's 2003 remarks on a new UN resolution were 'misinterpreted'

30 May 2010 Key evidence given to the Chilcot inquiry by Labour ministers about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was contradicted head-on by a top French government official at the Hay festival today.

Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, the French ambassador to Britain, also said there was no hard evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the 2003 invasion and had therefore failed to comply with earlier United Nations security council demands.

Tony Blair repeatedly blamed Jacques Chirac, then French president, for the failure to get a second security council resolution – something most senior government lawyers, including at first the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, agreed was needed if the invasion was to be lawful.

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However, Gourdault-Montagne said Chirac's comments had been "misinterpreted". Chirac had made it clear that he meant France could not have supported a new UN resolution at that time as it would have triggered an invasion despite the lack of evidence that Iraq possessed WMD.

The ambassador, who was Chirac's chief foreign policy adviser, was being interviewed at the Hay festival by international lawyer and academic Philippe Sands QC.

"We cannot be satisfied with flimsy evidence about WMD," he said. The argument for the use of force was based on the issue of "non-compliance" with past UN disarmament resolutions, he added. "[We] never, any of us, had the real evidence." Continued