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“... no report, even one a great deal more muscular than the Whitehall insider’s memorandum to which Lord Butler has given birth, has the capacity to settle whether Blair was acting in good faith over Iraq, since if to act in good faith is to act in the conviction that what you are doing is right, regardless of any empirical evidence that may convince other ...”

“... he married at the age of 23. Initially he worked it alone, then with his close friend William Hutton, the future historian of Birmingham. In 1765, Bage expanded his activities, investing in ironworks as part of a consortium that included Erasmus Darwin. When the ironworks failed in 1779, at a personal loss of £1500, ‘the result filled him with ...”

“... Croslandite Labour Right and the more fashionable partisans of stakeholding, championed by Will Hutton. Responding to Blair’s insistence that rights be balanced by responsibilities in his latest stake-holding testament, The State to Come,* Hutton identifies the tendency for obligations to be urged on the poor (to search ...”

“... month’s papers showed the lucky few holding up numbered tickets to the public gallery at the Hutton Inquiry. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was numbered tickets to Westminster Hall that were in demand: two Jacobite earls and a lord were on trial there. Graphics are not what they were – no swirl of copperplate ...”

“... it reaches the sea that the valley opens out, with the giant docks to the left and right. Philip Hutton, an architectural historian, thinks Dover’s layout makes it look like ‘a hammerhead shark’: that long tapering stretch inland, and then the massively spread-out head of the port areas facing the sea. It’s a town that invites this sort of ...”

“... when they both worked in the City. (Heywood, who died in 2018, left the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten ...”

“... Court’s jurisdiction. Irritated, the SNP set up a further review group under the chairmanship of Lord McCluskey. Alas, that group endorsed the views of the first panel. In the interim Alex Salmond, then the first minister, and his secretary for justice, Kenny MacAskill, had engaged in highly personal attacks on the UK Supreme Court and its members, prompting ...”

“... suspicion of public tears, especially when shed by a notorious tough nut, such as Oliver Cromwell, Lord Eldon, Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher. The Protector was repeatedly denounced for his ostentatious pretences of piety and feeling: he was ‘fluent in his tears’, endowed with ‘spungy eyes and a supple conscience’. In The Masque of ...”

“... to Iraq’) and the devastating Scott Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described ...”

“... significance of comet strikes on Earth’s development. In the 17th century, Descartes and James Hutton supported the idea of a steady-state system, or at least that the Earth goes through regular patterns of change such that its future state can be predicted, while others – such as Jean-André Deluc, who first introduced the term ...”

“... Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the Speaker’s pension. 21 May. Sure enough, having disposed of the Speaker, the Tory media have launched a campaign for a snap election – exactly as Frank Dobson ...”

“... who are no more the choice of the people than the bishops are. He decided to abolish the office of lord chancellor before even a pretence of consultation without its occurring to him that it wasn’t constitutionally possible to do this by simply announcing it from the Downing Street sofa. Criminal justice bills followed one another in a manner that has ...”

“... used it often, usually attributing it to Wheldon, most startlingly in his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry concerning Andrew Gilligan’s reporting on the Today programme of the Blair government’s ‘sexed-up’ Iraq dossier.The phrase is useful because it expresses something of the BBC’s relationship – in the minds of its senior staff at least ...”

“... much for too little, and very nearly lost everything. It left him with a huge amount riding on the Hutton Report, which appeared the next day. Here, however, Blair could be pretty confident that his luck would hold. He knew, as we all know now, that Lord Hutton’s wheel was tilted heavily the government’s way. It was ...”

“... people want to watch something on BBC4, they seem to be able to find it – lending support to Lord Burns’s idea of a top-sliceable licence fee, in which the public service product of all existing terrestrial channels is met by licence fee money, divided up by a regulator. (Burns was an independent adviser on the Charter Review.) For the group that ...”