And what's especially galling is having seen all the transcripts, and noticed James Dingemans and Peter Knox asking questions which suggested they were interested not merely in whether Gilligan is a duff journalist (which we knew), but also in how our country's managed, and whether this can go badly wrong. The Hutton Inquiry had the potential to produce a fascinating analysis of modern British life - and now we'll never know what it would have said.

Dwight and Hamilton were in good company. From Voltaire and Rousseau to David Hume and Edmund Burke, some of the century's finest minds were ready to countenance conspiracies of one form or another. That fact makes it difficult to dismiss the Enlightenment's fascination with these dark developments as simply irrational aberrations. On the contrary, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood has argued, Enlightenment conspiracy theories may have represented a transitional step on the way to a more nuanced and "scientific" understanding of the world.