ABSTRACT
According to Anthony Sampson, Lord Hutton’s Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death on 17 July 2003 of the defence scientist Dr David Kelly ‘revealed more secrets about the working of government than any investigation over fifty years’. Sampson compared the Hutton inquiry to the 1957 Bank Rate Leak Tribunal, ‘which laid bare the workings of the Bank of England and the Treasury’. He also compared it to Lord Denning’s inquiry into the Profumo scandal, which gave a ‘backstairs view of the murky frontiers between Number 10, defence and intelligence’ (Sampson, 2003; Sampson, 2004, pp. 161-3, 192).
