Ministers in Tony Blair’s government were prepared to use cluster bombs in their intervention in Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2000, declassified files show.

The “consensus seemed to be ‘so be it’, despite the widespread concerns over UXBs [cluster weapons]”, a Ministry of Defence (MoD) official wrote in May 2000 referring to a recent Cabinet meeting.

The controversial weapons were banned eight years later, in the international Convention on Cluster Munitions, and in a treaty that entered into force in 2010.