Lord Goldsmith's legal advice to Tony Blair about the legality of the Iraq war does not contain the smoking gun the killer quote that the prime minister's opponents had been hoping for.

The expectation of the media had long been that this now-fabled document would state categorically that it would be illegal for Britain to invade Iraq without a second United Nations resolution. But to the evident relief of the prime minister's supporters on Wednesday night, there was no such sentence in Lord Goldsmith's statement.