TWO governmental reports on the foot-and-mouth epidemic have been released within hours of this morning's big football kick-off.

A Defra report came out on the department's website yesterday and the National Audit Office report was embargoed until midnight - just seven-and-a-half hours before the nation concentrated on England versus Brazil.

The football is bound to steal the headlines, no matter what the reports say.

Conspiracy theorists will be shouting about the Government spin machine trying to bury awkward news. After the fatal embarrassment of Stephen Byers, the spin machine would have to be truly stupid if it were trying the trick once more, particularly as it coincided with the first of Tony Blair's televised press conferences which are designed to show him operating warts and all without the aid of any spin doctors.

In fairness, though, with the nation at fever pitch over the football, which we all pray will last until cup final day, there might not have been an appropriate time to release the reports for another three weeks. And then the Government would have been accused of perpetrating a cover-up...

However, the Government only has its reliance on spin, which it claims is behind it now (or is that just spin, too?), to blame for people's suspicions. It also shows how far it has to go if it is to rehabilitate itself as open and trustworthy.

More important than the timing of the reports is their content. More important still is what will happen to that content.

The Defra one confirms that Heddon-on-the-Wall was the source of the outbreak. The NAO one confirms that some people saw the epidemic as a means to make a fraudulent fast buck, and it confirms that various Government departments operated in a state of chaos.

But what happens to these findings now? How will they be collated with the European Union investigation, the reports of Northumberland and Devon councils and of the three separate Government inquiries currently on-going?

That's eight different reports that we know of into one out-break. Who is going to sit down, pull all the strings and strands together and come up with definitive, independent conclusions about how we can prevent future infection, fraud and chaos?

No spin in the world can change the fact that the Government was wrong to go to such lengths to block a public inquiry.

The one definitive conclusion from the 1967 foot-and-mouth epidemic was that no lessons were learned. But we are in danger of repeating that mistake in 2002.