Should the UK introduce a legal duty of candour on public officials to tell the truth in inquiries?

There are questions that reveal a nation's fault lines, and there are questions that reveal it has none — this was the latter, with a duty of candour for public officials carried 62 to 3 across every generation and both sexes. When the 16-24s and the pensioners agree on anything, let alone a change to how the state investigates itself, the usual grammar of British division simply doesn't apply.

What little dissent there was scattered thinly through the middle-aged cohorts rather than clustering anywhere meaningful, which is itself telling: this was not a culture-war question dividing left from right or young from old, but closer to a moral floor almost nobody wanted to argue against. The near-unanimity among women, all of whom backed it, and the overwhelming majority of men reads less as a political alignment than as a shared verdict on what public trust requires.

The result echoes the long shadow of Hillsborough itself — decades in which grieving families watched institutions close ranks rather than tell the truth, a pattern repeated at Grenfell and in the infected blood scandal. That this bill carries Hillsborough's name and still commands support this lopsided suggests the public has simply stopped accepting that cover-up is the price of institutional self-protection.

If there is a lesson in a 95-point margin, it is that some accountability questions have already been settled in the country long before Parliament catches up.