The execrable United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is feeling persecuted. Yesterday he blamed the Oil-For-Food scandal on the United States and Britain, and Britain isn’t happy about it: UK hits back at oil scandal claims.

Britain has hit back at UN claims that it turned a blind eye to illegal oil smuggling during Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Bill Rammel, the Foreign Office Minister, has insisted that Britain consistently upheld international sanctions against the Iraqi dictator.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has accused Britain and the US of turning a blind eye to illegal oil smuggling in the 1990s, allowing the regime to make billions of dollars. He said that Baghdad had earned far more from the illicit trade than from kickbacks under the UN’s oil-for-food programme.

Mr Annan said that Britain and the US could have stopped the smuggling but failed to act because the countries involved - Turkey and Jordan - were key Western allies.

Mr Rammell insisted that Britain had fully supported the sanctions regime. He hit back at Mr Annan, saying that the UN needed to learn the lessons of the inquiry by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker into the oil-for-food programme.

“We have been co-operating fully with the Volcker inquiry. And what I do know is that his interim report actually makes criticisms of the UN management system and not of national governments,” he said.