War & Peace Quote by Clare Short

Clare Short’s sentence lands like a deliberately lobbed grenade: not a legal argument, but an accusation about the motives behind law. The key move is her refusal to treat the halted prosecution as a neutral “case decision.” She frames it as an act of self-protection by “the attorney,” implying the state isn’t merely enforcing rules but managing embarrassment. The verb “stopped” does heavy lifting: it suggests intervention, not due process reaching its natural end.

Her subtext is about institutional contamination. The defence, she says, would have “question[ed] legality,” which threatens to pull “his advice” back into view. That phrase “again” is a quiet reminder that the public has already been here before: official legal assurances were issued, contested, and partially buried. In British politics, that instantly evokes the Iraq War and the infamous controversy around the Attorney General’s advice on its legality. Short is pointing to a recurring pattern: when legality becomes the battleground, the government’s own paper trail becomes a liability.

Then she deploys the most politically useful kind of vagueness: “something fishy.” It’s colloquial, almost offhand, and that’s why it works. She’s not presenting evidence in a courtroom; she’s signalling to the public that the real story is not the defendant’s actions, but the state’s credibility. The line turns “legal” into a rhetorical costume, and hints that power uses law not as constraint but as cover.