When the news that another part of the Attorney General’s advice had been leaked was announced on the Guardian Election Blog last night, EK posted this comment:

Tomorrow’s Guardian editorial: “Yeah but, no but, yeah but, no but, vote Labour.”

Well, surprisingly and laudably, the Guardian Leader didn’t say that. It being Polly Toynbee’s day off (the Guardian to its credit does allow Francis Beckett to rebut her latest insult), Jonathan Freedland got the shitty end of the stick.

Something we’ll probably not see analysed too closely in the media - who’ll not want to kill the golden goose - is who is leaking this advice. The Government must be looking pretty hard for whoever it is though. Going by the past experience of the David Kelly affair, if the leaker’s identity was known to the Government, surely they’d be briefing and smearing with gusto by now. We’ve had two leaks of parts of the advice since Sunday - somebody somewhere thinks it’s more damaging to release the document in easily digestible chunks rather than the whole thing at once.

If there’s more to come then now it’s a question of managing the news cycle to their advantage for both the leaker’s handlers and New Labour. This may very well peter out over the Bank Holiday weekend (as it did when this came up again just before the Easter break) unless somebody somewhere is determined to maintain their momentum and upset Labour’s. Or Alastair Campbell comes up with something really gangbusters. Certainly for today at least, the Labour campaign is knackered.

Whether this is going to sway any voters is anybody’s guess - if you’re registered with a polling organisation like YouGov check your inbox often over the next few days. You can imagine there’ll be some pretty angry cabinet ministers and Labour MPs who saw this advice for the first time last night but they’re hardly likely to rock the boat with a week to go. Party discipline is going to be pretty tight.

One thing we can be sure of is that this government has an almost pathological fear of caveats. The caveats were removed from the intelligence of Iraq’s WMD in order to make the case for war. In a belt and braces move, the caveats have been removed from the Attorney General’s legal advice. Lying by omission is still lying.

Regardless of legality or whether the Attorney General was leaned on, this legal advice was finessed by somebody for the consumption of the Cabinet and Parliament. Like the WMD intelligence, Blair and his entourage couldn’t trust either (or the public for that matter) to give him unequivocal backing for the war based on the legal advice as it stood.

Unable to argue the case on its merits (such as they were), Blair chose obfuscation (Jack Straw’s on the Today programme again as I write), cutting-and-pasting and, at the end of the day, brass neck and crossed fingers.

UPDATE: Charlie Whitaker at perfect.co.uk

UPDATE: The balloon’s gone up.