In 1996, I was an investigative reporter working in the newsroom of The Independent. There was great excitement because the report of the four-year long Scott inquiry into the sale of arms to Iraq was due to be published. I’d covered the entire affair since the beginning, when the directors of a Coventry specialist machine tools manufacturer called Matrix Churchill were prosecuted by Customs and Excise for exporting weapon parts to Iraq without permission. The trial collapsed when a former minister, the late Alan Clark, admitted he had been “economical with the actualité” about what he knew regarding government licences to Iraq. Tory ministers had relaxed the ban in 1988 without telling Parliament. When they were later challenged, they told Parliament there had been no change.