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.