Space scientists this week picked up a signal from the far side of the Moon.

It was the faintest of blips from an exploratory mission that for four years has been cartwheeling ever deeper into the void.

Ladies and gentlemen, we can but marvel at the news: the Covid Inquiry is still going! And how. That feathery pulse from the dark recesses of the political universe brought us some truly astronomical information.

We learned that Lady Hallett, 76, the crossbench peer chairing the inquiry, has now amassed more than £1 million for her efforts. She has also been paid some £45,000 in expenses, which suggests that some of her precious time has been spent in the back of a taxi. Kerching, kerching.

Nor has the old beak yet completed her exertions. The inquiry which I have visited as a reporter, is not expected to end until ‘the first half’ of 2027. That could mean another 11 months of tax spondoolicks for retired judge Heather Hallett, by which time she will have netted some £1.35 million.

All that plus a retired judge’s nosebag and any state pensions to which she may be entitled. There’ll be buns for tea chez Hallett for decades to come.

Here at the Daily Mail we like to see people get on. Even so, for a septuagenarian parliamentarian to pocket well over a million jimmies for presiding over a public inquiry, like some scops owl blinking atop an enormous egg, is jolting – and, I suspect, impolitic.

It is taxpayers who are lining her tree-hollow with £50 notes. How do you feel about that? Proud of yourselves? Or ripely brassed off that a judge is making such hay while the country is in disarray?

It is more than six years since a respiratory virus spread from a Chinese lab across the world. Covid rapidly caused death, economic ruin and social destruction.

Here in Britain we had three lockdowns. All citizens save those deemed ‘key workers’ were confined to quarters. Basically, the kingdom was under house arrest. Officialdom went mad. The economy plummeted. Psychological damage was untold.

Some of the problems we now face as a nation such as swingeing taxes, depression in young people, shirking from home and mistrust of the police were caused or accentuated by lockdown.

Boris Johnson, who had just been elected on a wave of post-Brexit optimism, nearly died from the virus. His premiership never recovered.

Labour wanted lockdown to continue even longer. Lockdown was socialism in ruinous action.

Masks were imposed on us by martinets who lost all sense of proportion. Churches were closed. Walkers in public parks were filmed by police drones. At a council crematorium funeral, mourners were shouted at for moving their chairs a few inches closer together, hoping to comfort one another.

Each day brought the terrible death toll, announced at those grim Downing Street press conferences. On supermarket floors, on public transport, in civic buildings and elsewhere, didactic stickers yelled at us to observe social distancing.

Never has Orwellianism felt more real.

Although those months from 2020 were acid-etched into our consciousness, they are mostly fading from memory. We have a biological inclination, as humans, to move on from painful experiences.

Mothers somehow overcome memories of the pain of childbirth. Something similar has happened with Covid. We have undergone an emotional reframing, a communal hormonal readjustment to put the trauma behind us.

That may be why Lady Hallett’s lumbering inquiry, with its room packed full of highly paid lawyers, is so objectionable. It awakens horrible memories. With its interminable ‘modules’ and its obsessive retelling of that unhappy time, it regurgitates disaster.

Of course, the longer they take over it, the more the meter runs and the fees mount. Classic lawyer tactic.

Aside from the psychological bruises there are sound practical reasons to object to Hallett’s circus: its cost; its self-indulgence; its dubious value; and its political tang.

The moment you arrive at its hearings, you realise you are at an opulent government event. Staffing levels are high. More ushers and flunkeys than a West End theatre, my dears. To the far end of the large room stretch computer terminals manned by lawyers, the atmosphere one of unquestioning self-reverence.

Try these statistics for size. En route to an expected total cost of £234million the inquiry has spent £2.2million on ‘support and safeguarding’, £16.5million on accommodation, £59.4million on barristers and solicitors, a further £27million on staff, £14.9million on ‘engagement and commemoration’. That last figure includes four commemorative tapestries the inquiry commissioned. These would help us ‘reflect and remember’. Was that any business of an official inquiry?

The inquiry was established to decide what went right and wrong during the pandemic, and the quicker the better. The next national health disaster might strike at any moment. Where is the sense of urgency?

Several countries have not bothered with a Covid inquiry, among them Canada, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, the Philippines, Singapore, Poland and Argentina.

Others did hold inquiries – NB past tense. That is to say, they have been and gone.

Sweden’s inquiry reported within months of the end of the emergency. France’s judicial inquiry ended in 2024 and decided no politicians should be charged with failures. A US Congress inquiry concluded within two years.

Meanwhile, Lady Hallett’s briefs toil away, martyrs to the cause of self-enrichment.

Britain’s clerical class has few equals in these things. The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War took seven years.

The Bloody Sunday inquiry lasted 12 years. When the government is picking up the tab, what’s the hurry? More juicy per diems all round!

From an official inquiry you want cold, quick analysis.

Lady Hallett’s hearings have not been spare, dispassionate proceedings. They have dabbled in victimhood.

There have been emotive scenes in the public seats. Covid activists have maintained a vigil-like presence, brandishing photographs of dead relations. You may think that only human but it does not help cool logic. It can lead instead to the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that insists we must all clap for the NHS.

The Hallett inquiry is very much a rainbow-poster affair, recording the personal misfortune of 58,000 Covid sufferers under its ‘Every Story Matters’ programme. Well of course every story and every death matters. But we do not need an inquiry to tell us that.

The inquiry strikes me as having been much infected by patronising hindsight and a simpliste take on public-health provision. Its barristers have expressed surprise and dismay at the chaotic nature of modern democratic government.

Such disapproval is easily polished amid the comfort of a deeply-funded inquiry room but it is not a practical help to what we should do next time.

Possibly nothing can prepare us for the next pandemic. Before 2020, much contingency planning was done for a flu outbreak. The Covid virus created different problems. That, alas, is life, and death. Not that the Hallett inquiry seems to comprehend such fateful concepts.

It wants everything to be predictable, accountable and, most of all, billable.

And so Hallett’s comet continues its journey into the cosmos, in the words of Mr Buzz Lightyear ‘to infinity and beyond’.