“LAW NOT WAR” was the predominant message of the anti-Suez demonstrators nearly 50 years ago. After Clare Short’s plainly premeditated ambush of the Prime Minister on Sunday night, it is a phrase we can expect to hear a lot more of in the next few days.

In contrast to the lawyers’ debate that accompanied the Suez escapade of 1956, there had not until then been any great argument about the legal aspects of an Anglo-American attack on Iraq. Indeed, the first warning signs came from Lord Archer of Sandwell — Solicitor-General in the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s — when he declared last week that any such unilateral action on the part of Britain and America would be “flagrantly unlawful”. For what it is worth, there is a suspicion among Labour MPs that such an opinion is not all that far removed from the view held by the current Attorney-General, the much-admired Lord Goldsmith.

The position of the law officers when it comes to advising their colleagues on questions of international law is always a delicate one. At the time of Suez, their views, along with those of the then legal adviser of the Foreign Office, were simply not asked for: given the essential trickery that lay behind the whole pretext for the invasion, that was, no doubt, a prudent course.

But it was also a high-risk one. When the Lord Chancellor of the day, Viscount Kilmuir, stampeded the Cabinet into accepting his view that it was the right of any nation to use force to protect its national interests, both the Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, and the Solicitor-General, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, were seriously disturbed.

The Lord Chancellor’s interpretation did not at all tally with their view of the law and they were much put out when they discovered that British embassies abroad had been circulated by the Foreign Office with a memo stating that the British Government had it “on the highest legal authority” that what it was doing was fully in accord with international law. Both Manningham-Buller and Hylton-Foster should, of course, have resigned in protest, but in politics each was a long-distance runner — the former going on to become Lord Chancellor and the latter to be Speaker of the House of Commons.

Could there be a replay of the earlier part of that scenario in the next week or so? Certainly, the present Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, can be counted on to play the robust role formerly filled by that staunch upholder of party loyalty, Lord Kilmuir. But what of the two law officers? The relatively new Solicitor- General, Harriet Harman, need not detain us for long; her mind is so firmly fixed on questions of sex discrimination that a mere matter of peace or war will have its work cut out to get her attention.

But the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, is a very different proposition. By consenting less than two years ago to take the office he currently holds — and agreeing to go to the Lords in order to do so — he was doing the Government a favour, rather than the other way about. There is absolutely no reason why he should feel compelled to underwrite any war policy if, in his view, it represents a violation of the UN Charter or a breach of international law. (Incidentally, he should already have pointed out to the Prime Minister that the Blair doctrine that a “capricious” veto can safely be disregarded lacks any basis in law or reason.)

Naturally, at moments of stress, the most eminent of luminaries often take up strange positions. One of the more shaming memories of Suez is that the individual who most vigorously defended the policies of the Eden Government was none other than that idol of the idealists, Gilbert Murray. Yet the great advantage of lawyers is that they realise that they have to answer for their decisions. If only on the principle of setting a bad precedent, most international lawyers remain, I suspect, highly sceptical of this country joining in any pre-emptive attack on Iraq.

I have no idea what the views of the current legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Michael Wood, are; but, if he stands four-square behind our new belligerent Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, he will be turning his back on the position taken up by his predecessor, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, when Britain last contemplated the same kind of invasion. This is what Sir Gerald had to say at the time: “The plea of vital interest, which has been one of the main justifications for wars in the past, is indeed the very one which the UN Charter was intended to exclude.” If such a view was so demonstrably right then, what — apart from all the huffing-and-puffing of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary — has happened to change the situation today?

ON BBC One’s Question Time last week that dapper Tory, Alan Duncan, came up, I thought, with a rather nice conceit. It was well known, he mused, that new Labour consisted of “a fragile coalition between old rebels and new robots”.

His remark caused me to wonder how the two separate elements have been faring — and I am happy to say that I found the results mildly encouraging. Leaving aside the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, among MPs in the Cabinet I put down for the “old rebels” John Prescott, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Margaret Beckett, Clare Short, Peter Hain, Patricia Hewitt, Charles Clarke, Paul Boateng and Nick Brown.

For the rival team of “new robots” I ticked off Jack Straw, Alistair Darling, Alan Milburn, Paul Murphy, Geoff Hoon, Andrew Smith, Helen Liddell, Tessa Jowell, Hilary Armstrong and John Reid. That makes two teams of ten each, but in terms of weight there can be no comparison. At least at the top of the Labour Party, the “traditionalists” still overwhelmingly defeat the “modernisers”. So much for the Blairite new Labour revolution.