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⁵ Randomly drawn from the entire set of 620 non-inquired issues identified for the research period.

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¹¹ That is, a government formed by a different party, e.g., events that took place under the Major (Conservative) government are ‘historical’ when addressed by the Blair (Labour) government, yet events that took place under Thatcher (Conservative) are not ‘historical’ when addressed by the Major government.

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¹⁶ Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, Inquiries Act 2005.

¹⁷ Council on Tribunals 1996, Public Administration Select Committee, Government by Inquiry, p. 66.

¹⁸ At the time of writing these lines, the most recent formal document on this matter is the 2005 Inquiries Act, in which Section 1(1) states only that “A Minister may cause an inquiry to be held under this Act in relation to a case where it appears to him that: (a) particular events have caused, or are capable of causing, public concern, or (b) there is public concern that particular events may have occurred.

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²⁴ In addition, it has been argued that the appointment of an inquiry serves to ‘block’ other investigative procedures – e.g., of parliamentary committees or criminal proceedings – as a result of rules and conventions governing conflicts of institutional investigative authority and freedom of speech, and particularly of the press (e.g., sub judice): Elliot, and McGuinness, , ‘Public Inquiry’, p. 21Google Scholar; Flinders, , The Politics of Accountability in the Modern State, p. 164Google Scholar; Kremnitzer, ‘The Landau Commission Report’; Polidano, ‘An Exocet in a Red Box’.

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⁴⁴ These include: government popularity; indicator variables for the identity of the prime minister; and an indicator variable for issues that have previously been on the agenda as inquiry-issues.

⁴⁵ The broadsheets were selected based on the availability in the Lexis-Nexis database in different years: January–July 1984: Financial Times (the only period for which only one newspaper was used); August 1984 – June 1985: Financial Times and Guardian; July 1985 – December 1988: Guardian and The Times; 1989 – 2003: The Times and Independent.

⁴⁶ The identification of an ‘inquiry’ followed the six criteria adopted from Sulitzeanu-Kenan, ‘If They Get it Right’, p. 5. A similar method was employed by Dewan, Torun and Dowding, Keith, ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 46–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dowding, Keith and Kang, Won Taek, ‘Ministerial Resignations 1945–97’, Public Administration, 76 (1998), 411–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for their studies of ministerial resignations.

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⁴⁸ For example, the 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ incident, which indeed had a second inquiry; and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which did not receive a second inquiry.

⁴⁹ Variations in the number of non-inquired issues are visually evident, yet no significant differences were found between election and non-election periods, between prime ministers, and between government terms.

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⁵³ The original coding instructions included four categories. The first two – ‘private individuals or corporations’ and ‘local authorities’ were merged into one category – ‘remote blame’ (see coding instruction in Appendix 1).

⁵⁴ Treating the coding as nominal data resulted in Krippendorff’s α = 0.6292, well below the lower limit of the 95 per cent confidence interval (0.7026), providing support to the coders’ ordinal conceptions. See Hayes, Andrew F. and Krippendorff, Klaus, ‘Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability Measure for Coding Data’, Communication Methods and Measures, 1 (2007), 77–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁵ Even when a specific event is asked about, the question rarely appears more than once.

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⁵⁷ This measure is a simplified index of media salience, after pre-tests have suggested that the use of a more complex index, which included the number of words per article and placement in the newspaper added very little information (5 per cent).

⁵⁸ Comparing the media salience of twenty inquiry issues between the Independent and The Times (averaged) to the Daily Mail (including the Sunday editions of all three newspapers) yielded a strong and significant correlation: r = 0.807, p < 0.001.

⁵⁹ For example, in the Dunblane shooting of 1996, and following the death of Dr David Kelly in 2003.

⁶⁰ For another use of (more distant) future conditions as a predictor of current behaviour, see Smith, Alastair, Election Timing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 113.Google Scholar

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⁶⁴ With low salience, the association was insignificant, and it is only at higher salience levels, a positive relationship is reported.

⁶⁵ The research period is almost equally divided among the three prime ministers: Thatcher, seven years; Major, 6.5 years; and Blair, 6.5 years.

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⁶⁸ Additional political variables were included in early analyses (see below), yet were omitted from the analysis reported here: overall time-trend, government term, and early/late term of a prime minister.

⁶⁹ Using the corrected regression constant based on the fraction of inquiries in the population (τ = 0.066) ( King, and Zeng, , ‘Logistic Regression in Rare Event Data’Google Scholar), and for median media salience (3.25), modal election period (0), mean electoral support (−0.25), modal prime minister (Major), and modal previous refusal (0).

⁷⁰ Following a similar method, when holding blame attribution at its modal – remote blame.

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⁷⁶ Mahoney, and Goertz, , ‘The Possibility Principle’.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Borrowing the terminology of Maor, ‘Feeling the Heat?’

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