The Thick of It, BBC Two, series 4, episode 6, review This fourth series of The Thick of It (BBC Two) has provoked a grumpy reaction among some diehard fans of its New Labour days, who complain that it used to have more one-liners - and that they used to be funnier, too. Saturday's double-length episode, with its much-trailed public inquiry - prompted by the suicide of cuts protester Mr Tickell and looking into Westminster's culture of leaking - threw those Blair-era fans a bone: its format ignored Leveson, and aped the 2009 Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War instead. The visual details were spookily similar to Chilcot: on the walls, the "Goolding Inquiry" signs were written in the same font, and witnesses were separated from the public gallery by the same kind of elasticated airport barriers. It does make sense - it would be impolitic, to say the least, for the BBC to lampoon Leveson before that inquiry even reports. And the Chilcot set-up made, crucially, for better sitcom. For a start, creator Armando Iannucci's fictional inquiry chairman, Lord Goolding (William Hoyland), could be flanked by a comic chorus of three fellow committee members. So Goolding himself was able to sit looking dumbfounded and pleading for plain English, while Simon Weir (Tobias Menzies, on his left) asked the searching questions. Well, some of the searching questions. Baroness Sureka (Priyanga Burford, on his right) did at least skewer spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (the ever-joyous Peter Capaldi) with photographic evidence that he had leaked poor dead Mr Tickell's medical records. When the camera was trained on the witnesses - who sat, Chilcot-style, in front of spectators who could giggle for the camera, rather than Leveson's stark white wall - some brilliantly detailed inquiry-satire sprang forth. Blue-sky ideas guru Stewart Pearson (Vincent Franklin) was directed to "page 235 of your witness statement," underlining the character's verbose self-importance. And a little vocabulary of dissemblance started to spring up, such as "I do not recall to that" and Tucker's homage to Alan Clark, "Je né remember rien." Indeed Tucker was the one to stretch the inquiry trope of "I can't recall" past its limits, and was - in bittersweet scenes for Tucker fans - pretty much banged to rights for leaking. "Are you finished?" asked Lord Goolding at the end of Tucker's closing rant. "Ah, I'm finished anyway," sighed Tucker. You didn't finish me. Yet the end for Malcolm Tucker is not the apocalyptic prospect that it might seem. The Thick of It wasn't funnier in 2005 than it is now - in fact, it was often quite bleak. This series's Coalition-focused episodes have been just as funny as those focused on Tucker and his life in opposition - and more satirical, given that they can play with real governmental events. The flaw in Saturday's episode, with its inquiry into spin and leaks, was that spin and leaks are no longer the hot political topics of the day. Westminster in 2012 is preoccupied with the dysfunction of the Coalition and the delusions of the Opposition, with social class and anti-social behaviour. Long may The Thick of It continue satirising it all - but it's time, sadly, for Malcolm Tucker to make his exit.