It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled the pandemic and came up with numerous suggestions for how things might have been done better. The initial response, it concluded, was too slow, but the report vindicated the decision to make social distancing measures voluntary rather than compulsory.

Why, then, has it taken the UK’s own Covid inquiry so long even to get going? In two weeks’ time the chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, will finally start to hear evidence for module one – which looks at Britain’s pandemic preparedness – but she has said that she expects to be collecting evidence for three more years. And then of course the report will have to be written. Perhaps by the tenth anniversary of the outbreak we may finally have some answers.

Meanwhile, the same apparatus that failed Britain so badly is still in place. If a new pathogen were identified tomorrow, we would be thrown back to the old Sage advisory system. There is still no proper emergency response protocol or any official requirement to check that public health interventions don’t cause more problems than they solve.

In the pandemic, the normal mechanisms of government were supplanted by impromptu WhatsApp discussions. We know this because Matt Hancock, the health secretary at the time, has since given all his WhatsApp messages to the investigative journalist Isabel Oakeshott so that she could ghostwrite his memoirs. Oakeshott in turn decided that it was in everyone’s interest to make the messages public in order that lessons could be learned, and the Daily Telegraph published them in what became the Lockdown Files.

Hancock’s messages make it very clear why the Cabinet Office does not want to pass WhatsApp records to the Covid inquiry now. They reveal that Simon Case, the head of the civil service, accused the then business secretary Alok Sharma of ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply because he worried about side effects of lockdown. Case also joked about travellers being ‘locked up’ in ‘shoe box’ rooms in quarantine hotels. If other civil servants are on record making similar remarks, it would reveal a shockingly cavalier approach to the powers that were assumed. It is easy to see why the Cabinet Office would want this covered up.

The lockdown WhatsApp messages offer a psychological profile of what happens when a small group is given too much power. They show how quickly normal protocol is abandoned. Civil servants end up just as tribal as the ministers they advise and just as happy to wield power without bothering with the usual checks and balances. Our politicians and civil servants are not malign or unusual. Without transparency in politics, this is the result. When the normal conventions are discarded, politics is all.

Baroness Hallett need not waste her time looking into the pandemic planning that was in place before Covid appeared. It was all overruled and replaced with a draconian plan devised by Neil Ferguson, an academic at Imperial College London. The Ferguson plan was rejected in Sweden on the grounds that the evidence did not justify such harsh measures, but it was implemented in the UK without any of the scrutiny that should and would have been applied to even minor public health interventions in normal times.

Basic democratic protections in Britain were easily swept aside. Academics who questioned the necessity of lockdown or pointed out the horrific side effects of shutting a country down found themselves the targets of smear campaigns from Tory MPs. How could this have happened? The answer lies in the politics of panic. This is what governed the pandemic, with fateful consequences – and we must understand that if we want to mitigate the effects next time.

As a rule, inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up, not elucidation. We still haven’t had the final report into the Grenfell Tower fire – a single event which occurred in a single night in 2017. It took 12 years to produce Lord Saville’s report into Bloody Sunday – which ended up being published 38 years after the events themselves. The Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war took seven years to conclude.

There is a very good reason why Baroness Hallett’s inquiry will not be reporting in the next 18 months: that would put its publication before the next election. From the government’s point of view, in other words, the more modules the better.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden looked to Britain for guidance. Its policy of keeping society as open as possible mirrored the UK’s pandemic plans. Sweden’s public health advisers were dismayed when Boris Johnson’s government tore up those plans – leaving only one country in the western world that stuck to an evidence-based approach. The latest global mortality figures show a striking trend: Sweden has had a lower level of ‘excess deaths’ (from all causes) than any country that locked down. There’s a lesson here. It does not need to take years for the British government to learn it.