Check this out. You might not agree with it all, you might find the emboldening of phrases a tad irritating, but it is nevertheless a very interesting, critical reading of the available data, which reaches a sadly plausible conclusion. What it also does is to move the debate on slightly from the simple question of whether the AHRC were pressured or not into subtler and frankly more worrying territory (territory that I think many of us had considered). In this sense the second of the 2 petitions I linked to earlier continues to be the one to support. Thanks to my mate, James Fraser, for the link.
I guess I am still concerned about where the idea of governmental pressure comes from. The people quoted in the Observer are no dopes and pretty smart operators, so I'm not quite sure that they can be just skipped over quite as easily as they are here.