Inquiries and politicians

GORDON BROWN is furious. Not an uncommon state in the case of the ex-prime minister, but one we have not seen in public since he retreated from public life after the election. The big engine that is Gordon steamed back to the Commons yesterday and promptly accused a top civil servant of blocking an inquiry he had wanted to hold while as prime minister, into the phone-hacking scandal at News International. Mr Brown is serving his revenge cold, which is not a pretty sight. But is he justified in complaining that Sir Gus O'Donnell erred in blocking the inquiry?

British political life is now choc-full of inquiries into the behaviours of its elites, from the mis-reporting of Iraq's alleged WMD possession in the run-up to the war to the newly announced, judge-led investigation into the extent of misconduct in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire. By definition, they tend to occur after the horse has bolted, when the mood is already sour and recriminations about who really knew what (and who sat on knowledge they should have shared), are whirling around the public domain. Mr Brown says that Sir Gus as cabinet secretary should have agreed to his demand for an inquiry into News International before the election. Possibly so, though much has emerged since which strengthens that case and Sir Gus was privy only to limited information about wrong-doing.

And Mr Brown omitted a key motivator in his own behaviour: the Sun had dramatically switched its support to David Cameron the morning after his speech to Labour Party conference. Up to this point, there was no sign that Mr Brown himself thought the phone-hacking worthy of an inquiry. So Sir Gus might well have concluded that the sudden desire for an inquiry the then prime minister wanted, a few months before the election, was politically motivated, rather than a service to media transparency and the greater well-being. And of course, had Mr Brown felt so strongly that the issue was one of national importance, he could have made public his belief that an inquiry should be held. No cabinet secretary could have prevented him from doing that.

Clearly, a danger lurks in the use of investigations as a political battering ram. Might Mr Brown's ailing government have been helped if the deserved censure against Mr Murdoch's papers had come earlier? Possibly, though Labour had as much to lose from its earlier proximity to the Murdochs as the Tories. Was Sir Gus right in worrying that an inquiry in the circumstances could only be construed as a last-ditch bid by Mr Brown to heap slurry on the heads of those who had deserted his party and its leader? Most definitely. Often, the civil service top brass stand accused of Sir Humphry-ish foot dragging. In this case, Sir Gus was right to watch and wait.