‘Ha ha. Godot will be here before the Chilcot Report. Ha ha’. If I heard this once I heard it a hundred times, from stand-up comedians, newspaper cartoonists, and occasional acquaintances, always delivered as if it was both original and hilarious. It was irritating to me as a member of the inquiry not because of the time it took to finish the report, which I found as frustrating as everybody else, but because I knew that it would be finished and that it would not be the whitewash widely predicted. I was sitting in the audience at the Hay Festival as Ian McEwan lamented that this was going to be yet another establishment cover up if it ever appeared. I tried but failed to ask whether any of his books had been reviewed before they had been completed.