The deep fear that drives politicians to impede the writing of recent history

There is a slightly sour taste of Maff taking the fall for what appears to have been a collective failure of political will

On the face of it, there is no connection whatever between the inquiry into foot-and-mouth and the stubborn refusal by Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, to admit even a modicum of doubt into the Government's previous and unprovable findings that the tragic Chinook crash in 1994 which wiped out the elite cadres of the Northern Ireland security services was caused by pilot error.

One is an inexcusable failure to overturn a judgment which flies in the face of two overwhelmingly persuasive Select Committee reports and which wouldn't be possible under sensible new rules which don't allow such a judgment when all the witnesses are dead. The other is a workmanlike account of a national economic crisis. But they have one common factor: a deep, almost irrational, fear that recent history could trip you up if you allow it to be freely written.

There are rare occasions when official inquiries shed real light on the working and tensions of government. Sir Richard Scott's inquiry into the Arms for Iraq affair was an example. Lord Justice Phillips' report on BSE – which followed a public (and hugely expensive) inquiry which the present Government was wholly delighted to set up since the deficiencies to be exposed were those of its Conservative predecessors – went some way in that direction. But those who look in Dr Iain Anderson's report for fresh insights into the inner workings of the Blair government at a time of national crisis will be gravely disappointed.

That doesn't – of course – mean that his report is pointless. Many of the recommendations are useful. And it charts some of the more remarkable features of the saga. The report underlines the time it took to ban all cattle movements – and the dangerous mass movements that took place between the outbreak on 20 February 2001 and the ban on 23 February. It excoriates the decision, catastrophic for tourism and based on the flimsiest of veterinary evidence, to allow such extensive bans on footpaths.

It complains eloquently about the relative inaction during the 31 days in which "a serious veterinary problem became a national disaster": it took a month to open the emergency Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) and nearly as long to involve the military. Nothing gives a better insight into the extent to which the National Farmers' Union, and on this occasion, the food industry, exercised a veto on crisis management than the passage outlining – and the report does no more than outline it – the famous Chequers meeting on 12 April when Tony Blair vainly tried to persuade the farmers' leaders to accept vaccination.

It helpfully reiterates the huge disparity in the distribution of costs between agriculture and tourism. The taxpayer forked out £1.34bn in compensation to farmers for the loss of their animals, and as the report delicately puts it, "in some cases it is likely that the compensation paid to farmers exceeded the amount they would have expected to obtain for their animals in normal conditions, possibly by substantial amounts ... to ensure their co-operation in the slaughter policy". At the same time, the costs to tourism were estimated to be between £3bn and £3.5bn, for which there was little if any real compensation.

But it also leaves a great deal unsaid. It hardly touches on the widespread rumours that a minority of greedy farmers deliberately cross-infected cattle in order to maximise their compensation. More importantly still, however, it is largely either silent or utterly bland on the politics of the crisis. It doesn't really explain why the Cabinet, No 10, or even the Cabinet Office were so slow to become fully involved in what was so evidently a disaster with inter-departmental implications.

It doesn't convincingly explain why, given that Baroness Hayman, the Agriculture minister, first contacted the MoD in the opening days of the crisis, it took so long to bring in the Army.

It buys almost completely into the carefully fostered retrospective story about the epidemic, namely that the Ministry of Agriculture made a hash of it by thinking it didn't need help, and that once Tony Blair took control of it, everything went much more smoothly. Maybe there's something in this; certainly most other departments seemed to have needed a Prime Ministerial imprimatur to become galvanised. And yes, Maff had proved in the past, not least during the BSE crisis, to have been a basket case department. But Dr Anderson certainly can't be accused of testing the theory to destruction, or indeed testing it at all. Instead there is a slightly sour taste of Maff and its ministerial head Nick Brown, taking the fall for what appears, at least in those first weeks, to have been a collective failure of political will.

It points out that Mr Brown did not sit on COBR. But it fails to point out that Baroness Hayman chaired many of the meetings, and fails to give any insight into what is widely believed to have been a breakdown of communication between No 10 and Mr Brown. Similarly, as Mr Brown's successor Margaret Beckett pointed out with a flourish in the Commons yesterday, the report emphatically exonerates the Prime Minister and the rest of the Government from the widespread accusations that it was influenced – for example in its now avowedly tardy decision to call in the Army – by electoral considerations. Given that he acknowledges that political pressures may have influenced the Government on the footpath issue, and given that the most electoralist and media-minded Labour government in history was indeed highly focused on an imminent election, you might have expected Dr Anderson to be slightly more agnostic on this point. All the more so since referring to Mr Blair's – entirely correct and pretty lonely – decision to postpone the election, the report says this was purely because Mr Blair was simply determined not to be distracted from solving the crisis. It is simply naïve to consider that Mr Blair was not also concerned about how a May election would have looked, especially to rural voters; any more than that he – and his colleagues – hadn't also been at least partly thinking about the election earlier. These are politicians, for pity's sake.

But then Dr Anderson, a no doubt clever man who had advised the Government before, was not put in to open up the whole inside story. Maybe it's hopelessly naïve to think that the Government would have had a full-blown public inquiry like the one on BSE. But it might have been more convincing if it had been undertaken by – say – a High Court judge.

Of course, it's all history now, just like the Chinook crash. But history, including near contemporary history, matters. A reversal of the Government's previous obstinacy on the Chinook crash would have been a blow for natural justice. And a less bloodless and more political account of those weeks after the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in late February of 2001 would have exposed some of the Government's weaknesses – as well as strengths – and helped to correct them in future.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk