The great whitewash

So what were you all waiting for? You surely could not have been expecting an inquiry, headed by an eminent law lord, to deliver an indictment of the government? They don’t do that, law lords. Certainly they haven’t in my lifetime. And it hasn’t happened now, with Lord Hutton.

But even by the standards of his equally well appointed and eminent predecessors — Lord Franks, Sir Richard Scott, Sir Anthony Hammond, Lord Denning, all of whom found it necessary to exculpate the political establishment when push came to shove — Lord Hutton has flung the whitewash around with a copiousness, a completeness, which must have surprised even the inhabitants of Downing Street. The only thing we can learn from the Hutton report is that next time we yearn and clamour for an inquiry into some piece of governmental chicanery, we should avoid at all costs importuning a senior member of the legal community to write it. Instead we should get someone a little more sentient, a little more observant, a little less inclined to accept without question the protestations of innocence of the ruling political elite. A plumber, for example. Or maybe the members of Atomic Kitten. Be a bit cheaper, too.

The Hutton inquiry established in the public mind — beyond all question — the government’s disingenuousness and deceit over the gravity of the threat posed by Iraq to the West. And then the Hutton report passed over, or ignored, or rather airily dismissed all of this stuff. Lord Hutton was merely following precedent here: the same sort of thing happened, if you remember, with the Scott inquiry into the selling of weapons to Iraq and, even more brazenly, Lord Franks’s inquiry into the government’s failure to prevent the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. The ability of law lords and the like to hear a mass of evidence and, having done so, to draw precisely the opposite conclusion to that reached by the rest of the country is almost as entertaining as their penchant of law lords for pronouncing simple words in a bizarre or anachronistic manner.