Transparency in Action or Political Fiction? the Pre-Inquiry Phase of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry

This paper examines the pre-inquiry phase of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, focussing on two key points of contestation – around the timing of the inquiry and its terms of reference. Drawing on an analysis of a wide range of documents, including newspaper reports, statements from government and grassroot campaign groups, parliamentary inquiry reports, and inquiry-related correspondence, the paper approaches the practice of ‘calling for’ (and resisting calls for) a statutory public inquiry and the process of producing terms of reference as ritualised negotiations that serve a performative function. They work towards the impression that an inquiry will produce all that is worth knowing about an event or an issue. To achieve this effect, governments must declare themselves committed to transparency, in both a general sense, by upholding the idea that inquiries serve as mechanisms of total knowledge, and in their specific contributions to the ritualised negotiations that characterise the pre-inquiry phase. At the same time, as this paper sets out to show, by deciding key features of an inquiry – when it happens and what it covers – a government creates a specific vantage point from which to review an event. In doing so, it plays a decisive role in producing an inquiry’s ontological and epistemological moorings and confirming a particular political fiction concerning ‘what happened’ and what ought to be done about it. In the case of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, this underlying political fiction is that the pandemic was an externally imposed-reality, unpredictable and largely uncontrollable. The paper is interested, therefore, in the strategic uses of transparency in at once asserting political disinterestedness and a commitment to obtaining ‘full’ knowledge of what happened, whilst confirming the limits of institutional knowledge and action.