I SOMETIMES wonder if the best way to bury a controversial story in Britain is to launch a full public inquiry into what happened. I know this sounds paradoxical.

You’d think the very opposite should be true. Public inquiries are almost always born out of social pressure, driven by human stories, journalistic curiosity, and perceived institutional failures.

Secure one, and everyone lawyers up. Senior judges are summoned to chair. ­Millions of pounds worth of public money are spent. In theory, this should give the press reams of material to work with as inquiry teams diligently unearth the facts, accumulate witness statements, and key actors find themselves taking the oath, ­exposed to examination and cross-examination by experienced advocates.

These days, evidence can be live-tweeted by journalists and broadcast live across the internet to the interested public. In the era of on-demand streaming, high-profile evidence sessions feel like a throwback to event television.

But for all this accessibility, all the ­potential drama, all the human and ­official interest entangled in these processes, ­British public life is planted thick with judge-led inquiries which attract a fraction of the media attention they merit.

Why? Legalism has something to do with it, I suspect.

Short attention spans

Given our modern society’s tendency ­towards short attention spans, forensic analysis easily becomes a euphemism for long, boring, and in the details largely unread, leaving the essence of a powerful story buried under the dead weight of the assembled facts.

Implicated in this is the issue of time. Public inquiries progress glacially slowly. Grenfell is one case in point. The inquiry published its final findings, a little more than seven years after the North Kensington tower block burned. Public life is flighty. ­Memories fade. Interest wanes. The news caravan rolls ever onwards.

Unless you can mobilise some other ­dimension of human interest in what’s ­being said – whether that’s the spectacle of Paula Vennells suffering under the cross of her failures at the Post Office, or it’s familiar faces from politics ­finding themselves confined in the ­witness box being grilled at the Covid ­inquiries – without the hook of celebrity or notoriety, the material public inquiries turn up can be all........

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