Britain's largest whitewash and largest sleight of hand were finally over yesterday.

The Hutton Report on the suicide of government scientist David Kelly was published. Not surprisingly, it exonerated the government entirely and blamed it all on the BBC. The reason this is not a surprise, and the reason the report is a whitewash, is that the government, and Tony Blair in person, get to pick the judge involved and to set the terms of the inquiry. That this leads to them being let off the hook is only to be expected. Rather than repeat all of the things the judge chose to ignore, let me reference an article in today's Guardian newspaper: Here. The whole thing, in the words of the slightly loony but always amusing Boris Johnson, is "a snow job of Himalayan proportions".

Beyond that, however, it is also a masterful sleight of hand. The entire debate on whether it was right to go to war in Iraq, on whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction (an increasingly unlikely proposition, it appears) and how the intelligence surrounding Iraq was used has been neatly sidestepped and the focus shifted onto an inquiry into what the causes of Dr Kelly's suicide were. The government has been exonerated on the latter. The former, more important, issues have been forgotten. The government spin machine and their supporters in the media will now try to give the impression that Hutton has supported them over the Iraq war. They will claim the debate is done. They will claim that they are shining clean, whereas they are simply layered in a false whitewash.