Whilst British government hasn’t been bad, relative perhaps to the present Saudi government, Mugabe’s government or Hitler’s government, that doesn’t mean its ‘reputation’ is anything worth regaining.

Britain’s ‘reputation’ is almost entirely a product of its own government’s PR, which is possibly not the most objective standard of measurement; and I think you’ll find that in spite of all that PR, in fairly large chunks of the planet our government is reviled almost as much as the US government now is, and for pretty much the same reasons. And d’you know what? Apart from the fact that it has a long-established aversion to the truth being discovered, it couldn’t care less.

Inquiries do provide a small service: they do reveal a little more of the truth than we might otherwise discover. But as an instrument of justice, as a tool for punishing previous wrongdoers and hence causing current wrongdoers to pause for thought, they are entirely useless.