Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg made a gaffe yesterday by calling the 2003 Iraq war “illegal” while standing in for Prime Minister David Cameron at the House of Commons for the first time.

Mr Clegg, a long-time opponent of the war, was replacing Mr Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions, the weekly showpiece question-and-answer session with lawmakers, while the prime minister visited the US.

In exchanges with Jack Straw of the opposition Labour party, who was foreign secretary when the war began, Mr Clegg called on him to “account for your role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq.”

The comment raised eyebrows because Mr Cameron supported the war, as did most of his Conservative party, which is now in a coalition government with Mr Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.

Downing Street insisted the comments were not government policy.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.