Margaret Beckett is still wrong about the Iraq war and WMD claims

‘Margaret Beckett is quite wrong to claim that “everybody in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”,’ says Frank Jackson. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

I voted for Margaret Beckett as Labour party leader in 1994, and given the same choice I would do so again today. No great radical, she nevertheless had roots in the party and the labour movement that Tony Blair never had.

However, she is quite wrong to claim, in her interview with Zoe Williams (Margaret Beckett on Blair, the Iraq war and half a century in politics, 17 May), that “everybody in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”. Williams rightly corrects her on this, citing the examples of Robin Cook and Clare Short. But there were stronger and earlier voices against the war on Iraq.