Grooming, Shipman, Chilcot: for all the post-inquiry ‘never agains’, the default is inaction | Isabel Hardman

The past week in politics has been a depressingly normal part of Westminster culture.

Ministers announced they were implementing recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.

But they resisted calls to set up another inquiry into the specific question of grooming gangs.

Resisting an inquiry is a stage that every government seems to go through with every scandal.

Kemi Badenoch used the 2024 election as a reason for not implementing IICSA recommendations.

But given the date of the 2015 election had been known for five years thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act .

Chilcot report was about learning lessons from intervention and post-conflict planning.

In the years it had taken to write, Britain had intervened militarily again, most notably in Libya .