You may have thought Chilcot was an attempt to get at the truth about how and why the invasion of Iraq happened. If so, you are either just out of kindergarten or Sir Martin Gilbert.

You may have thought the Inquiry is an attempt by New Labour to whitewash over any evidence of it having insanely wasted £11 billion and hundreds of thousands of lives. In that case, you’d be one of the majority of people in the British Isles.

You may even be of the conspiracist tendency which fancies Sir John’s gentle farce to be a security agency attempt to blacken the reputations of those it doesn’t trust. To believe this would be to overlook the obvious fact that politicians have the capacity to achieve this via their own actions, without any help at all from MI6.

In fact, the Chilcot Inquiry is a moral tableau being put on by the Establishment. Like most morality plays, it is there less to entertain than to reinforce the correct form of behaviour for those who must obey. ‘The Establishment’ can too easily become a vague term used by deluded Marxists and far-Right racists. But the misuse of the term doesn’t make it unreal. In contemporary Britain, the Establishment is an alliance – as it always will be in a media-savvy State – of those who want to control what we know, what we think, and what we feel.

In the 1950s, The Establishment wanted us to believe we were still a great power –utterly stable, hard-working – and yet more meritocratic than ever before. Spookily, the last part of the required image wasn’t that far from the truth. When Macmillan told the British in 1959 “You’ve never had it so good”, he was both doing the bidding of those in charge – and reflecting the popular truth of a culture emerging from the restrictions of a war economy.

Here in 2010, we are required to accept two associated precepts: that we have been very bad boys and girls indeed; and that beyond the Nursery there are terrible folks who will (without the help of determined and righteous people) send us to our room, and probably our doom.

The core illusion underpinning this – that we are merely irresponsible children – is drummed into us day after day: by the content of our TV channels, the magazines and tabloids we’re offered – and the style of politics we are forced to endure. Indeed, the success of this political playground fight is a final testimony to the truth of what we are being told: ‘you are a wicked and yet vulnerable Mob of castaway flies. You are thus capable of horrid things, and only worthy of bread and circuses. We – and only we – are the serious people who must tell you what’s what’. Thomas Hobbes couldn’t have put it better himself.

The forces in that ghastly place ‘abroad’ are everywhere exaggerated. Rag-tag organisations incapable of detonating the simplest bomb remotely are dubbed ‘global networks of terror’. Equivocal data suggesting climate change are given supernatural power with the ability to melt mountains and burn every human to a crisp. The genuine crises the elite can’t or won’t control – dysfunctional economics, chronic water shortages, population explosion and sovereign bankruptcy – are dismissed or ignored.

Examined with clarity and in depth, the elite’s propaganda is almost all complete rubbish. But somehow it hangs together in this, our contemporary context of uncertain fears and lost personal responsibility. Depressingly, it allows a bizarre coalition of the politically correct and the incalculably wealthy to continue, as ever, untouched by real life…..and privileged beyond belief.

Far from being ‘bad’, the UK remains one of the most tolerant and easy-going nations on the planet. Its traditions of humour, irony, fairness, liberty, legal equality and quiet determination not to offend created (until the current ruling class took over) a culture of decency that was the envy of all sane and free nations. It created the NHS, a multi-ethnic society, the decriminalisation of sexual aberration, Grammar Schools, and a uniquely talented set of people at the cutting edge in film, advertising, photography, fashion, technology and retailing.

But since the start of the 1970s (and especially once Thatcherism became fully established after 1982) an unholy alliance of feminists, failed hard-left socialists, quangoid safety obssessives, bankers, globalist theorists, police, lawyers and management consultants have hammered away at two pillars of British tradition, trying with all its might to deny their existence: our preference for fair play, and an ability to fend for ourselves without their ‘help’.

This post 1970 Establishment brought us everything from affirmative action and ambulance-chasing lawyer ads on television, to Birtspeak, trees being found guilty of assault, markets that must decide, and financial Masters of the Universe. It also brought to prominence a young man from the very core of this Establishment. Amoral, greedy, superficially charming – and a chic Oxbridge liberal silk with a taste for rock music and celebrities – Anthony Charles Lynton Blair covers every last one of the bases required in order to represent the modern Top Drawer. And thanks to his engorged ego, in my informed opinion, Britain entered an alliance and a war for which everyone outside that elite has had to pay in terms of both money and lives.

His delusions of grandeur also helped to let rip a propertied financial system of such obscene stupidity, citizens of this country will be paying for the folly over many decades to come. But that grub didn’t hatch out on Tony’s watch – and so he has been asked to account only for the Iraq invasion. Except, of course, that what he’s really been given is a stage upon which to absolve himself of all responsibility – and ram home yet again the vital message: there are terrible people out there, and only the likes of me and my tribe can protect you.

One suspects that the ultimately naive Gordon Brown – a man the elite has never liked, but unfortunately a man corrupted by his own personality problems –thought the Iraq Inquiry would leave him in the clear….and nobble his arch enemy Tony Blair. He may even have thought himself jolly clever for sticking Roderic Lyne on the Chilcot panel – a man still bitter (along with many others) after his betrayal by Blair.

However, the real people in charge – secret policemen, top banks, leaders in waiting, peers, senior Mandarins and even one or two media proprietors – have done everything in their power to ensure that the Blairs and Straws get away with it. And on television, the message between the lines of their moral tale repeats to those who would challenge the status quo, ‘nothing will come of your efforts to get at the truth’. (But if anything does, there’ll be a sixty-second delay).

And yet –as often happens in mainstream history – a seemingly all-powerful oligarchy allows its arrogance to create mistakes. Despite its best efforts, the existing Establishment has seen some antique clues it wished to store in the attic trunk become valued items. After a slow start, Chilcotiana is becoming highly collectible.

First, the leadership clique of the Liberal Democrats has missed no opportunity to drive witnesses into the Inquiry, insist on most proceedings being public – and point out where the evidence of those like Straw and Goldsmith has been at best confused and at worst mendacious.

Second, in the world outside the inquiry, the lobby-fodder so easily kept in line with shiny beads and trinkets have done what ‘those who don’t know how to behave’ always do: not only abuse the privilege – but also show no skill at all in covering it up.

Third (and this is perhaps the crucial one) institutions upon whom the elite thought they could rely for loyalty – like the Daily Telegraph and a few senior civil service professionals – haven’t been prepared to play ball. They’ve investigated, and dug, and leaked. And they are now within an ace of helping prove beyond reasonable doubt that a perverse Establishment has both evaded and undermined British constitutional practice on a grand scale.

Finally, where there was once only Private Eye, there is today an (as yet) uncontrollable webspace – a blogging, questioning and thoroughly disrespectful internet made up of every shade of radical, anti-System writer and satirist.

From here onwards, the elite in place is fighting for its life. It stands accused of driving a man to suicide – perhaps of even assassinating him. It has illegally raided an MP’s office. It has first denied the existence of expenses data – then tried to censor it, and then tried to charge those who received it with security offences. It has tried (and failed) to keep key witnesses away from the Iraq Inquiry. And during that inquiry, it has let only a slow dribble of Iraq-related documentation become declassified….and always too late for the Chilcot panellists to conduct their business of first gathering documents (and then hearing testimony) in the correct order.

In short, the events in and around Chilcot are an old Establishment fending off an emergent one. The odds seem on the surface to favour the old; but in the last week, the tide has perhaps turned. The new cultural backlash is still ill-defined and disunited, but there is a growing sense of sea change.

Whether the power-freaks like it or not, collecting Chilcotiana is likely to become a mainstream hobby. Last week the FT’s Sue Cameron told the Iraq Inquiry Digest website breathlessly:

“Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war is starting to turn into a bit of a thriller. It’s not so much a whodunnit – we all know who the guilty men are. It’s the clues as to how they did it – the slow, patient uncovering of their mistakes, their apparent deceptions as they tried to hide their tracks. I’m even having a few Miss Marple moments.”

The thousands of observers and commentators who appear to be little more than anoraks on the subject of Chilcotiana – the corruption, spin, abuse, illegality and illiberal practice we see in brief flashbacks – are nothing of the kind. These are history-changing weeks: an enormous amount of our future contentment as a culture depends on getting the right result.

Without those amassing the full set of clues, pestering the Inquiry and the media – or harassing political leaders – we will merely get the predictable result.

That would be a tragedy. A discredited era of some forty years standing is coming to an end. The quicker a new Establishment defeats the old one, the quicker a better epoch can emerge out of the mess.