MICHAEL HOWARD and Charles Kennedy raised the Iraq war as a central campaign issue for the first time yesterday as they seized on fresh claims that the Attorney-General had given warning that it could be illegal.

Mr Howard delivered a sustained personal attack on Tony Blair, accusing him of being a liar and telling the public that the election was the last chance to make a judgment on his character.

Mr Kennedy said that the election was turning into a referendum on the issue of trust. The Lib Dem leader will today call for an inquiry into the decision to invade Iraq, with an emphasis on examining the political, strategic and legal advice given to ministers and the decisions which they subsequently took.

The Liberal Democrats will seek to widen their appeal by placing advertisements in tabloid newspapers that highlight excerpts from Mr Kennedy’s speech to his party conference last autumn, saying that Britain should never again be taken to war in such a way.

A report in The Mail on Sunday suggested that while Lord Goldsmith never said the war was unlawful, he gave six reasons, in a 13-page paper, why it might be. The report prompted a swift statement from Lord Goldsmith in which he insisted that his advice had been that the war was legal.

According to the report, he said that there was a strong argument that it was up to the United Nations, not Mr Blair, to rule on whether Saddam Hussein was in breach of his obligations to give up his weapons of mass destruction.

Lord Goldsmith was said to have questioned whether Britain could use the UN Security Council resolution 1441, which gave Saddam a “final opportunity” to disarm, as a basis for military action.

Mr Howard used the re-emergence of the Iraq issue to bolster his campaign that the Prime Minsiter lied. He had told lies to win elections, he said on the BBC One Breakfast with Frost programme, adding: “On the one thing on which he has taken a stand in the past eight years, which is taking us to war, he did not even tell the truth on that.”

He said: “This is the last chance the British people will have to send a message to Mr Blair, to say to him we are fed up with your broken promises, we are fed up with the way you lied to win elections, as over tax, and we are fed up with the way you lied to us over the war.”

The Tory leader also insisted that he would continue to campaign on immigration, brushed off opinion polls suggesting he was heading for defeat and insisted he had given no thought to his future if that happened.

Mr Howard said that immigration was “one of our five themes and we will continue to talk about it, as well as talking about the other themes we will be talking about at this election and I will tell you why. It is . . . a matter of fair play that we have a fair immigration system and a fair asylum system.

“If you look at what happened over the war, the intelligence he had, as we know from the Butler report . . . that it was limited, sporadic and patchy. When Mr Blair came to report back to the country he said he had intelligence which was extensive, detailed and authoritative. Maybe you can reconcile those two different sets of words. I can’t.”

Mr Howard rejected suggestions that his repeated calls for voters to “send a message” to Mr Blair, coupled with his brief manifesto, meant that he did not expect to win. “The country is heading in the wrong direction. The problems will pile up. I believe we have the right answers. The country needs to change direction.”

The Lib Dem advertisements, in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail, attempt to answer criticism from some commentators for not having made more in the campaign of their opposition to the war and of Mr Kennedy’s style of leadership, which some claim lacks dynamism and charisma. The Lib Dems insist they always intended to talk about the Iraq war in the second half of the campaign, in order to use the opening fortnight to highlight their core domestic policies and avoid accusations that they lacked a broader message.

Mr Kennedy held a meeting with senior Lib Dem MPs and officials at an hotel in Wimbledon, southwest London, yesterday to review their strategy for the final ten days of the campaign.

Afterwards, the Lib Dem leader claimed that it was clear the Conservatives now had no chance of winning the election and urged people to back the Lib Dems as a more effective way of casting their votes. Mr Kennedy said: “The election is now becoming a referendum on whose judgment you can trust, and in, particular, the judgment shown by both Tony Blair and Michael Howard in backing George Bush’s war in Iraq on the basis of unfounded claims about the threat of weapons of mass destruction.”

Although most opinion polls have suggested that Lib Dem support has failed to gather momentum after an uplift in the early days of the campaign, the party’s biggest fear was of being squeezed out if the Tories were seen to be in a neck-and-neck race with Labour.

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