Public trust in the political process has collapsed in the wake of Expensesgate. If there was ever a time for openness – long established as a principle of good governance – it is now. Transparency is the political watchword of the moment, with all parties committing themselves to full public accountability. Jack Straw last month abandoned retrograde plans for secret inquests. When the government announced its new counter-terrorism strategy earlier this year, Jacqui Smith said that tackling terrorism is ‘no longer something you can do behind closed doors and in secret’. ‘Need to know’ is becoming, rightly, ‘responsibility to provide’.

And yet the Iraq inquiry process, if not the majority of its findings, will be hidden from public view. We are told it will meet in private but publish all except the most sensitive of its conclusions. This is the wrong way around: it should as a rule meet in public and only hear the most sensitive material in camera, where strictly necessary for national security. Openness should be the default position.

In choosing to follow Butler rather than Hutton as its model, the government has made a mistake. The public interest must come first.

How has that public interest been served by the ongoing MG Rover inquiry, initiated by Alan Johnson, which was meant to report, in his words, ‘as quickly as possible’? That inquiry has been conducted in private over the past four years, at a cost of over £14m. It remains unpublished. What use is that to the many in our car industry who have in the meantime lost their jobs?

Let’s put paid to the line that private inquiries are necessarily swifter, or cheaper, than public ones. And let us be honest: a public inquiry held in private is a contradiction in terms.

It has been widely accepted for some time that there is a need for an inquiry into the origins of the invasion of Iraq and the government has, in turn, long promised such an inquiry.

However, wide acceptance does not mean this view is universally held and the sceptics are not limited to the opponents of the war. There are those who believe that MPs are elected to take decisions and then stand by them without reference to the perceived wisdom of retired judges, civil servants or other varieties of the great and good.

But we are where we are. Unfortunately, the government – no doubt with the best of intentions – seems to have set up the Chilcot inquiry in such a way as to invite immediate accusations of a cover-up.

However baseless such accusations, the inquiry will be conducted entirely behind closed doors. The motivation for this is easy to see: that some witnesses will be compromised or be unable to speak freely. Perhaps it would have been better to have left such decisions to the members of the panel rather than to have set them in stone before a word has even been heard.

If the subsequent report is perceived as too easy on the government, the cries of ’cover-up‘ will become ever louder and increasingly difficult to rebut, however unfair they may be.

Already, we have heard strongly worded criticisms from families of service personnel killed in the conflict while the press has had something of an early field day.

While it is absolutely clear that sections of the fourth estate are determined to attack the Labour government by any means, my worry is that we may handed them a powerful weapon.