What hit you was the number of lawyers, a phalanx of black suits at computer screens, fingers feathering the keyboards.
At the far end of the soulless, rectangular room, a witness related corporate tensions from 15 years ago. A designer-stubbled barrister helped this former military police Major assemble her complaints.
Progress was glacial, but that hardly mattered.
Time was mere money and money endless, its source being the taxpayer.
Such was the scene on Wednesday at the independent inquiry relating to Afghanistan, which is probing alleged war crimes by the SAS in Helmand province between 2010 and 2013. It is one of 30 or so public inquiries grinding their way through the sausage machine of our body politic.
Inquiries are lucrative for lawyers and the judges who habitually chair them. It was said that some senior silk in the Hillsborough inquiry pocketed more than £1 million each. The going rate on the inquiries circuit is up to £250 an hour for barristers.
Others also profit. Document-management platforms are making a ‘bandit’s packet’ (to quote one source) from inquiries. Specialist assessors are on juicy contracts. Then there are the property rents, salaries for back-office staff and doorkeepers, not to mention the photocopying of mountains of evidence. Plus chocolate biscuits. Oh yes, inquiries look after themselves. The Afghanistan inquiry has a free, well-stocked coffee bar. The mineral water is posh.
No wonder that one former Lord Chancellor has been heard to say that ‘inquiries are a total disgrace’.
Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced another public inquiry into the Manchester synagogue attack, only this week
But short of holding an inquiry into inquiries, what can be done?
To attend the Afghan inquiry hearings – something almost no citizen bothers to do – you head through a dingy doorway by a building site near St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Take the lift to the first floor,’ advised a receptionist. And there, in a low-ceilinged modern office complex, it was: a nest of taut-faced advocates being paid by the state to rake over historic events.
I counted 24 lawyers plus another 13 legal-looking bods in the public seats. The one sitting in front of me was from Matrix Chambers, the Left-wing legal outfit. She spent some of the time looking at details of her upcoming corporate away day. Perhaps the legal profession forgets that members of the public or the nosey press may sometimes be in attendance.
Proceedings opened with an usher’s stern injunction that we should respect the majesty of the law. After a cry of ‘all rise’, in loped the inquiry’s chairman, Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, 70, sometime senior presiding judge for England and Wales. A long, lean lad with the bearing of a hungry heron, he mounted his dais with a skip and settled down to another day of creamy eminence and delicious emoluments.
Something similar plays out at hearings of the Post Office Horizon scandal inquiry, the Salisbury poisonings inquiry, the Omagh bombing inquiry and many others.
Ministers find inquiries moreish. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced another one, into the Manchester synagogue attack, only this week. Once created, they may lose their appeal for politicians. Communities Secretary Angela Rayner is accused of ‘not engaging’ with the inquiry into grooming gangs. By the time it reports, she could be in the House of Lords.
There is the Cranston inquiry on small boat crossings, the Southport inquiry on the 2024 stabbings, the Northern Irish Truth Recovery Independent Panel, the Fuller inquiry into necrophiliac killer David Fuller, the Anglioni inquiry into the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by off-duty Met Police officer Wayne Couzens… well, the list is long.
The current jackpot daddy of them all is the Covid inquiry presided over by Lady Hallett. That has gobbled more than £200 million of public money. The Haddon-Cave operation is more frugal, having gone through £58 million so far. Not that we know when it might report. It has been going only three and a half years.
Are public inquiries worth the cost, not just in money but also in societal self-flagellation and extended heartache for family members?
Last Monday, the House of Lords debated the Robert Hamill inquiry, which has only just published its report into the death of a young Roman Catholic, Robert Hamill. He was kicked to death by loyalists in County Armagh in 1997. That was 29 years ago, four years longer than the unfortunate Mr Hamill lived. What must his family think? The Hamill inquiry, since you ask, cost £33 million. Inquiries are commissioned by politicians after particularly difficult scandals or tragedies. Ministers can put a halt to media scrutiny by saying: ‘We must now leave these matters to the inquiry.’ If deadlines are discussed, it is only ever loosely.
The saying goes that ‘lessons will be learned’, but the more time elapses, the less likely the relevant authorities will still be around to learn them. The minister will almost certainly have moved to another role, possibly out of politics altogether. Blame is dodged.
Inquiries have never been more prevalent. The Institute for Government, a political think-tank, calculates that since 2005, 63 inquiries have been launched, a third more than in the previous 20 years. There have never been more inquiries ongoing, and the pace at which they are being commissioned is accelerating. They are also taking longer. The 1983 Franks inquiry into the Falklands War took six months, and its cost was ‘negligible’.
Today’s inquiries often have loose terms of reference, with judges who stretch those terms to their limit. There is also concern that ‘core participants’ are given the right to submit written material. This clogs the system.
Sitting in that room on Wednesday, I yearned to shout, ‘get on with it!’ So much time was wasted on legalistic niceties – the ‘may it please you, sirs’ and the needless, ornate checks as to a witness’s written evidence.
The Covid inquiry’s stolid Lady Hallett does not seem a woman to rush her shots. Her inquiry, which was announced in May 2021, will likely not complete its work until the middle of next year. Let us hope ‘lessons learned’ have not by then been overtaken by another deadly pandemic.
Inquiry delays are also caused, surprise surprise, by civil servants.
Whitehall submits thousands of pages of material in disclosure documents – the greater the volume, the more likely it is that mandarins’ errors will not be spotted.
All the while, alleged SAS war criminals – who in fact may simply have been serving Crown and country in a filthy foreign war – are left to worry, their reputations sullied, while grievance-chasing Left-wing lawyers enjoy the spectacle of a country paying for its own prosecution.