Britain's former ambassador to the US rejected angry criticism of his memoirs on Sunday which questioned the government's role in the lead-up to the Iraq war, saying a light needed to be shone on what had happened.
In his book, Christopher Meyer said Prime Minister Tony Blair was "seduced by the glamour of US power" and failed to use his influence in Washington to get the United States to draw up proper plans for the aftermath of the war.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw reacted angrily to the comments, saying Meyer had broken trust with politicians.
But in his only interview on the subject, Meyer said his book "DC Confidential" had been cleared by the Cabinet Office for publication.
"My instinct is publish and be damned, because I do think that there are areas of activity in foreign policy and in government where it is right to shine the light of day," he told BBC television.
Ministers were elected to serve the public and it was "legitimate and reasonable to be able to describe in some detail how they perform their jobs when they go abroad", he said.
Meyer, whose book was serialised in two national newspapers, said he still supported the decision to invade Iraq but felt mistakes were made over the timing of the war.
"I thought Saddam (Hussein) ought to be removed," he said. "I haven't changed my opinion. (But) what is clear to me now ... is not that we should not have gone to war but that we should have gone to war in better order.
"(This) is a criticism made with hindsight because I can now see ... that had we given ourselves another six months to get these things sorted out we should have been better equipped to handle Iraq after Saddam was removed.
"It would have given us more time to put in place the kind of mechanisms, alliances and arrangements that might have avoided all that bloodshed which we have had to suffer." Meyer was ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003.
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