The Mueller report is just a US version of the Butler review on Iraq: a glancing blow and nothing more

Those who prefer not to be guided by recorded fact have chosen their bespoke version of the truth already. Nothing in his report will alter that

Officially, William Barr addressed the American media about the Mueller report this morning (Washington time) as the attorney general of the United States.

In reality, as the loyal parroting of his boss’s no-collusion mantra made clear, he was speaking as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer; a saner, jowlier, less car crashingly hilarious Rudy Giuliani.

Seldom has the phrase “I serve at the pleasure of the president” had quite such a cloying, dismal ring. As the world awaits the “lightly redacted” report, the constitutional implications of that might seem worth a brief linger to those who care about such matters.

Corruption comes in many forms, and not all of them as blatant or sensational as the allegations of dodgy dealings with Russians which Barr – flanked by morose deputy Rod Rosenstein and a chap with a classically Russian beard that mildly amused in the context – insisted Mueller has entirely disproved.

One of these is the corruption of independent oversight. When an attorney general fashions himself into a president’s public relations front man, with palpably nothing more on his mind than preemptively building the narrative framework, something is desperately wrong.

But it’s unlikely that those who didn’t fret about such niceties before will do so now. Whatever the unredacted portions of Mueller’s 400 pages reveal won’t significantly move public opinion about Trump’s fitness for office.

Things have been desperately wrong in Washington, after all, since 20 January 2017, when he swore to defend the constitution without so much as a smirking nod to the inevitably impending irony of that.

Barr referred to Mueller investigating 10 episodes of potentially criminal obstruction. That, in the fashion of the old Grandstand vidiprinter spelling an outlandish football score lest the number be taken for a typo, is TEN.

But even were it a hundred, a thousand or a trillion, it would matter very little – and not at all if Mueller’s language is as carefully coded as you’d expect from a cautious career lawyer of the old school.

A useful template here is the Butler Review into the Blair government’s abuse of intelligence material before the invasion of Iraq.

Lord Butler was a highly intelligent and sophisticated guy, but his mother tongue wasn’t English. It was the Whitehall dialect of mandarin that is the lingua franca of the senior civil service.

His gist was unmistakeably that the government took diabolical liberties and conned the country into a war. His language was so elegantly euphemistic that Alastair Campbell and his Murdoch catamites were able to spin it 180 degrees into total absolution.

The liberal media screeched its righteous fury, while The Sun and The Times splashed with exoneration. Blair survived – scathed of course, but not so badly that he didn’t comfortably win a general election a year later.

Stand by for something eerily similar when Mueller’s report is released. If anyone with a dash of analytical integrity knows he is pointing towards felonous obstruction (in the sacking of James Comey and elsewhere), Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the sweethearts of Fox And Friends will flip that on its head.

Republican congresspeople will drench the airwaves with their pre-selected cherry-picked lines from Mueller to take. Democrats will howl that Mueller has all but placed the handcuffs on the prez’s tiny hands, if only the Department of Justice would have the courtesy to click them shut.

The American public, or the portion that isn’t comatose with boredom, will be loosely split into three camps. One decided from the off that Trump is bang to rights on both collusion and obstruction. Another long ago concurred with the tangerine lardbucket on the Oval Office broomstick that this has been the nastiest witch hunt since Salem.

The third category will put those contrasting reactions down to a wearisome case of he-said, she-said-and-who-gives-a-toss-either-way?

They’ll shrug and get back to worrying about tonight’s ball game, the car repair bill, or the state of the Wall Street stocks in their 401s.

To the indifferent majority, constitutional trifles such as an attorney publicly deriding his oath of office, or whether a sitting president can ever be charged with a felony, are best left to Beltway nerds and lawyerly geeks.

Everyone from sea to shining sea, as across the planet, irreversibly made their minds up about Trump ages ago.

Those who prefer not to be guided by recorded fact chose their bespoke version of the truth. Nothing in his report, and nothing he might tell a congressional committee if and when he testifies there, will alter that.

So far as Trump’s reelection, or otherwise, it’s still the economy, stupid. That apart, and regardless of Mueller, his observation that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing support remains one of the very few indisputably true lines he ever spoke.