Hoon: Brown is to blame for Army shortages.

He tried to oust Brown from office less than a fortnight ago, so we should not be surprised that "Buff" Hoon has once again tried to stab Brown publicly.

Gordon Brown withheld funds demanded by the armed forces in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, it was revealed yesterday.

Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary at the time of the Iraq war, told the Chilcot inquiry that the Ministry of Defence had "asked for significantly more money than we eventually received" from the Treasury in July 2002, less than a year before the invasion.

The Chilcot Inquiry was set up to look at the reasons why Britain invaded Iraq. The people with their heads on the block are Blair and Hoon and all the others who manipulated the intelligence and sold the country a pup.

So, it's not surprising that Hoon should seek to make what Brown did more important than what he and Blair did at the time.

In his evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Mr Hoon said that accounting changes introduced by Mr Brown six months after the invasion of Iraq had led to "difficult" spending cuts and a budget under "severe constraint". As a result, spending on helicopters was cut.

Troops in Afghanistan have had to rely on lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers, putting them at greater risk from roadside bombs. "Had that budget been spent in the way that we thought we should spend it, then those helicopters would probably be coming into service any time now," Mr Hoon said.

The Tories have honed in on the availability of helicopters, so Hoon is hardly being subtle when he appears before the inquiry and highlights that very subject.

Hoon is famous for talking out of his ass, as the inquiry heard yesterday:

Documents published by the inquiry yesterday also revealed that Mr Blair's top legal adviser rebuked Mr Hoon for suggesting that an invasion of Iraq would be legal without "specific" permission from the United Nations. Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general, chided Mr Hoon for putting him in "in a difficult position" over the legality of military action in a strongly worded private letter written a year before the invasion took place.

In the letter, Lord Goldsmith said Mr Hoon should not have claimed in a television interview that Britain and the US were not obliged to seek permission for any invasion from the UN. He also warned him that there were "considerable difficulties" in justifying the use of force on self-defence grounds.

Lord Goldsmith fired off his missive after Mr Hoon had made the claims during a lengthy interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. "As you are aware, the law officers' opinion has not been sought on the legality of possible action and I have not therefore offered any views on the legal position," he wrote.

"The clarity of your statement and the apparently authoritative way it was produced puts me, however, in a difficult position."

So, the man who thought Britain and the US could attack Saddam without "specific" permission from the UN now wants us all to know that the mess on the ground was all the fault of Gordon Brown.

Is there anyone out there who is naive enough to swallow this bullshit?

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Tags: Iraq war, brown, Blair, Hoon, Chilcot Inquiry