Controlled, patrician disgust was seldom more devastatingly done. Sir Brian Langstaff’s verdict on Whitehall careerists and their cover-up was delivered to hundreds of victims at Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall.

That great edifice of non-conformism was not a bad place for a withering assault on Establishment shibboleths such as the civil service and the sainted NHS.

Sir Brian, 76, with a speech of gathering force, tore into the ‘doctor knows best’ belief and officialdom’s arrogant omniscience. 

Authority itself was on trial here. With nicely-weighted exasperation, Sir Brian found it wanting.

In recent years we have been instructed that experts know best. 

Sir Brian Langstaff, 76, with a speech of gathering force, tore into the ‘doctor knows best’ belief and officialdom’s arrogant omniscience

Friends and families of victims of the blood contamination demonstrate at Central London Methodist Hall yesterday 

Kenneth Clarke, a long-past health secretary, has argued that ‘sensible people’ like him should run the country without much undue heed to the grubby punters.

Sir Brian cut through all that. His inquiry exposed Clarke and others. ‘The public,’ said Sir Brian, ‘should be trusted with the truth, with all its uncertainties.’

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His voice hit every consonant, lending the speech a precision one might once have called clinical. 

The adjective feels tarnished now.

Sir Brian’s sibilants accentuated his exactitude. 

When he uttered the word ‘risks’, those frictive ‘s’ sounds hissed and hung in the air. 

‘Cirrhosis,’ was another. And ‘doctors.’ 

The final letter sounded accusing, antiseptic in its disappointment at how trusted professionals behaved. 

The audience heard of the Establishment’s reflexive ‘denial, disbelief, dismissiveness and delay’. 

This was a well written speech, euphonious but powered by moral anger.

Behind Sir Brian, in the gloaming, loomed the hall’s vast, 1912 Hill organ, gothically backlit in green. 

He stood alone on a pale stage. Beside him on one side was a trolley of blood-sample bottles. 

Authority itself was on trial here. With nicely-weighted exasperation, Sir Brian found it wanting. Pictured: Relatives become emotional ahead of the release of the report on Monday

On the other was a table piled with copies of his inquiry’s report into the infected blood scandal.

The staging was unusually dramatic for the end of a public inquiry. Sir Brian’s oratory, likewise, was also more freighted than the norm. 

Will it set a new standard? One hopes not. These things only work if they are authentic.

He was so closely miked that we could hear the phlegm in his own organ pipes – he seemed to have a summer cold and had to blow his nose. 

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The microphones also caught the noise of water gurgling down his throat when he swallowed a drink of water. 

There was a brief pause after that biological sound. This was a raw, human occasion.

Most of his half-hour speech was heard in silence, though there were a few bursts of rapturous, fervid applause and one male shout of ‘justice now!’ which Sir Brian acknowledged with a raised palm.

Otherwise, attention focused on this small, old-fashioned figure with the delicate bone-structure, grey hair and an English gardener’s suntan. 

Who’s Who says Sir Brian’s hobbies include bell-ringing and lawn-mowing.

With this speech he certainly took his Flymo to the mandarinate.

One hooded eyebrow rose no more than an eighth of an inch to convey his exasperation at civil servants’ squalid conduct over the years. 

It was ‘unconscionable’. The word was subtly elongated. Lethal.

He held his hands in the air to form inverted commas as he quoted a cynical official’s memo complaining that a health minister had started to show too much sympathy for the victims.

The staging was unusually dramatic for the end of a public inquiry. Sir Brian’s oratory, likewise, was also more freighted than the norm

It could have come from ‘Yes, Minister’ said Sir Brian with disbelief.

This was a top-quality caning from an old-school beak. He pronounced the ‘w’ in ‘why’. 

He made the second syllable in ‘donor’ sound like ‘oar’. 

Did he push his oratory an inch too far? Few will mind that he did.

Three hours later Rishi Sunak rose in the Commons to voice, with commendable seriousness, a ‘whole-hearted, unconditional apology’ on behalf of the state.

It was a scandal that ‘should shake our nation to the core’, said the PM, acknowledging the attendance upstairs of some of the victims.

They listened closely and gave a few nods, their lips pumped.

The House was silent. 

But that gormless specimen David Lammy merely looked at his mobile telephone.