The Iraq War story is never going to go away. Now the Government is faced with an order to disclose the minutes of two Cabinet meetings where the reasoning behind the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, was discussed by ministers.

The way in which Cabinet Secretaries write up their notes of Cabinet meetings, it is probable that the minutes of the two seesions in question, held between March 7 and March 17, 2003, are fairly anodyne and broad-brush.

Nevertheless, no Government likes to have its inner thoughts broadcast to the outside world, especially when the subject matter is as sensitive as the invasion of Iraq.

Nearly everything else about the decision-making process has now been published, including, of course, the full text of the legal advice given by Lord Goldsmith, QC, then Attorney General.

So what might the Cabinet minutes reveal which could open up old wounds, or reawaken the whole issue of why Britain went to war five years ago?

The key interest would be to see which ministers cast doubt on the justification for war - apart from the ones we know already (the late Robin Cook, then Leader of the Commons, and Clare Short, then International Development Secretary) - and whether anyone referred, enthusiastically or otherwise, to the merits of regime-change in Baghdad. The Government has always denied that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the main or even the secondary reason for invading Iraq.

The Government will fight the Information Commissioner’s ruling by appealing to the Information Tribunal, just as it did when a Freedom of Information Act request was put in for the release of the draft document about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) drawn up by John Williams, the former press secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Government lost that argument, and the Williams dossier was duly made public.

This latest foray into the Freedom of Information Act is more serious for the Government. Its lawyers will no doubt have been confident that the minutes of a Cabinet meeting would be sacrosanct, and that Section 35 of the Act which provides an exemption against disclosure, would suffice.

However Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has never regarded Section 35 as a blanket exemption, and in this case, he believes the argument for disclosure in the public interest outweighs the Government’s desire to keep secret, for good Whitehall traditional reasons, the musings of ministers around the Cabinet table.

Times Recommends

• DIY video helps the WI get to grips with sex
• Artists urge nation to save Titians
• Go home, Iraqi leader tells Britain