It might not have been the immediate public inquiry sought by opposition parties and bereaved families, but the landmark joint report into the UK handling of Covid proved less toothless than some feared.
Public almost exactly a year after the MP inquiry was first announced, the lessons learned to date report, prepared by two Commons committees after mammoth evidence sessions, is not short on lessons some of them that are expressed with notable bluntness.
The delay to impose a first lockdown in spring was one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced planning for a possible virus outbreak smacked of British exceptionalism, the lack of early testing capacity was an almost unimaginable setback The condemnation goes on, echoed through 151 pages, with just about the only element of pandemic response spared a kicking by the vaccine rollout.
While the Commons Health Committee and science and technology committee are cross-party, taking Labour and SNP members as well as Conservatives, they are led by Conservative ex-ministers Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark.
Clark, the business secretary under Boris Johnson, who was shunted into the backbenches by Theresa May, is unlikely to expect a return to ministerial life and has relatively little direct political investment in the issues scrutinized.
From 2012 to 2018, Hunt was health secretary and was central in planning for such pandemics. He has clearly not relinquished the idea of coming back into government, or even competing again to be the Tory leader, and would therefore arguably have a vested interest in not overly upsetting either Boris Johnson or Conservative MPs more generally.
The Lib Dems had expressed in particular concern that Hunt's involvement in Pandemic preparations, including an independent report into a 2016 exercise based on the outbreak of a respiratory virus details of which only emerged in the Guardian last week made his hand concerned in the report.
While the initial report, submitted on Tuesday was highly critical of both ministers and scientists, opposition MPs mentioned said final versions, notably its conclusions, were significantly less damning when first presented. It took many hours of rigorous debate to agree the final version, they said.
Wrangling is standard on cross-party reports but the stakes here were high: the first official attempt to apportion some responsibility for what was arguably the biggest political crisis since the war, and one where the UK performed significantly worse on several metrics than neighbouring countries.
The view from opposition parties is that the committees' report showed what can be gained from such rapid inquiries but should only be seen as a start.
Although Johnson promised a full public inquiry into the pandemic, this will not begin until spring 2022 at the earliest. It was this delay that prompted Hunt and Clark to launch their own process, arguing it could avoid future errors.
It was, however, always a process with limited scope and beset by political compromises. So, although many failings are outlined, they are generally urgent; there is nothing in the report likely to prompt the end of a ministerial career or even prompt an urgent question in parliament.
This is n t enough, said one MP involved in the process. We owe it to the families of those who died that they can help you get an exact answer on who got it wrong.