And to think that if Alastair Campbell had resigned a year ago, as he said he wanted to, the row between the government and the BBC might never have reached such a furious intensity. Dr Kelly might never have been caught up in it and perhaps there might never have been a Hutton inquiry. And we might never have heard the remarkable evidence of Geoff Hoon.

Hoon started his evidence to Lord Hutton’s inquiry looking tolerably alert, with his ears pricked like one of those long-nosed mastiffs which scavenge for crumbs around the table in pictures of renaissance banquets. Two-and-three-quarter hours later he looked and sounded more like a rheumy-eyed, snuffly old dog whose owner has not the heart to have him put to sleep.

What did he not know and when did he not know it? By the end of Wednesday morning, every time Hoon admitted that he was unaware of this or that happening within the Ministry of Defence (MoD), there was a little gasp from the onlookers, a mixture of derision and pity. Such a case of Awareness Deficit Syndrome should fill the psychology textbooks for years to come.

If you had asked the defence secretary whether he was passing the buck, he would probably have said he was unaware of there being a buck. The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary might think about including the adjective “hoony”: “deliberately drifting through life without making any impact on events”.

The first hoony moment came with almost the first question from the inquiry’s counsel James Dingemans QC (no flies on him and he might almost be worth however many zillions he earns). Had Hoon had any involvement in the drafting of the famous September dossier? Well, he did see a couple of drafts at a relatively late stage in the process but he offered no comment.

This was only the dossier intended to persuade the British people that Saddam Hussein needed to be confronted once more, as a result of which thousands of the servicemen under Hoon’s political control might be called to fight and some might die. Moreover, some of the evidence had been culled from his own defence intelligence service (DIS), not to mention another of his staff, one Dr David Kelly. However, no comment.

Was he aware of any unhappiness in his department? Not until after publication when the “linguistic concerns” of two DIS members were reported to him — by which time it was, of course, too late to alter the language.

Next Dingemans asked whether he had ever had lunch with Kelly. No, said Hoon, seeming to bridle at such a suggested breach of protocol. But he admitted his practice was to eat in the old War Office canteen — he spoke of this as of some heroic act of condescension — and once at the end of lunch he was approached by an official who engaged him in conversation and said he strongly supported the war. He never found out who the man was. Only after Kelly’s death did one of the scientist’s daughters remind him of this encounter with her father.

Here again one pauses in mild incredulity. Would it not be natural to turn to your lunch companion — his private secretary — and ask: “Who was that bearded bloke?” If he had, he would have been told that he had just been talking to the man who was, to quote his friend and colleague Wing-Commander John Clark, “really the fount of all knowledge on Iraq”. But Hoon appears to operate, rather like the army used to in dealing with homosexuals, on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis. So a meeting which might have altered so much fades into oblivion only to be reactivated by an awful tragedy.

We are getting to know the sound of the Hoon dead bat, so when his permanent secretary Sir Kevin Tebbit tells him that an MoD official has come forward and said he recognised some things that he had said to Andrew Gilligan in the notorious Today broadcast of May 29, we are not surprised at his reaction. Hoon recalls that he had been told on joining the MoD that it was a three-legged stool — occupied by military, civil service and political masters — and this was not, so to speak, his leg, being a personnel matter and for Tebbit to deal with.

But he was anxious to correct the public record, was he not, Hutton interjects. Was that a personnel matter?

Hutton’s interjections are fearsome things. They are delivered with the utmost courtesy, but that glacial Ulster resonance chills you to the marrow. When he hears the reply, his lordship leans his fine white head into his cupped hand and exhales a prolonged, half-muffled “Yerss” which might make you think he was weary of this world if the interjection had not been so sharply to the point.

So, one by one, we pass through the key moments in which Hoon did nothing in particular and did it very well, to quote WS Gilbert on the House of Lords. It was the fallback strategy of the No 10 viziers, Jonathan Powell and Campbell, that Hoon should write to the BBC offering to reveal their mole if the BBC men would reveal theirs. It was Sir David Omand, the tough nut at the Cabinet Office, who at a No 10 meeting pressed for Kelly’s name to be revealed. Here Hoon had taken the precaution of not merely being absent himself but also fielding no MoD representative at all, Tebbit being away in Portsmouth handing out medals for preventing HMS Nottingham from sinking — one of the few actions of any practical use mentioned in the proceedings.

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