Of all the predictable things in life, one of those that you could have put your shirt on was Tony Blair trying to avoid anything about the lead-in and the conduct of the war in Iraq being heard in public.
Because our ex-prime minister has much to hide and much to be ashamed of.
His loud proclamations of his Christian faith and the morality that attaches to it were always deeply suspect and, following hard on his miserable collaboration with the Bush administration during the war, always looked like someone desperately trying to cover his tracks in the face of a failed gamble.
Had it succeeded, had Saddam Hussein been proved to have had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction pointed at the West with a 45-minute margin for destruction and mass killing, Mr Blair would have triumphed in his gamble and he would forever have walked around boasting of having saved the West from millions of deaths and awful destruction.
But it failed. There were no weapons, the gamble didn't pay off and, instead of Mr Blair wearing the halo, he is now skulking around, trying to avoid accounting in public for misdeeds including gambling with the lives of over a million people simply because his philosophy of international relations was based on snuggling up to the playground bully and pressuring those less able to defend themselves.
And it was also based on a policy which has been parodied in plays and films ever since - the obscene secret service mantra of plausible deniability.
Because that's where the unprincipled vandals that have taken democracy and disfigured it so totally that it is virtually unrecognisable are coming from.
To Blair and his ilk, the truthfulness and sincerity of a policy are not the issue.
What is at stake for them is the shape and structure of the world, and that shape and structure must match what their class and their financiers demand.
If you make a claim and base a war on it, its untruthfulness must be plausibly deniable, you must be able to say that, at the time, you believed in all the rubbish that you were spouting and proceeded on it in good faith.
Being right doesn't matter, being honestly misled is an acceptable excuse.
But we aren't talking about the finances of a crown green bowling club here, we are talking about a million lives lost and a country plunged into anarchy and mass killing. It's certainly not a shock that Mr Blair doesn't want to account for the devious manipulations that he was involved with in public, where they can be recorded and held against him later.
And it isn't surprising that Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and all the others who went through that period in Cabinet are trying to get away with a secret inquiry where their testimony will not be publicly scrutinised but, when challenged, are indigantly denying that secrecy was ever on their minds.
But these are not respectable politicians. They are war criminals with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands and it ill behoves new ministers to stand up in public and equivocate.
Iraq saw an illegal, bloody and murderous war, prosecuted by people who still, in this country, hold the reins of government. They were supported by an opposition which is now trying desperately to backtrack on that support.
But, once again, this paper insists. They are war criminals and must pay the price for their crimes.
Openness is not an issue. The Iraq inquiry must be completely transparent and public.
There are no security issues large enough to justify secrecy here.
And, ultimately, the war criminals must pay for their crimes or we live in a society that has foresworn and abandoned any ideas of decency and justice.
