Helen MacNamara

There's a different judgment to apply.

So the Foreign Office has forever really had its own way of making sure that its people, because there is some white horse snobbery here too.

It's the Foreign and Diplomatic Service.

It's not the Home Civil Service.

They hold themselves to their own, even got their own honour system, actually.

They certainly do.

Yes, so they're a kind of special and quirky and rather amazing place, but they have a different way of doing vetting because they've got different things to worry about and actually because they know different stuff and because it's different if you're operating overseas than in the UK.

So all of this stuff is not actually, it's not that surprising that giving a literal tick box exercise for somebody who's going to be given some information who's working in the Food Standards Agency, which was the example that Ollie used rather magnificently,

is going to need a different kind of judgment to somebody who's going to go and be our ambassador in Tehran.

Well, I'd be really worried if the vetting service had looked at Lord Mandelson, even for the stuff in public, and thought, this fellow seems fine, let's go.

I mean, you wouldn't expect that.

You'd expect that in the process.

So if you see it like a layered approach, and you've got the developed vetting people do all the interviews, they do all the referencing, they find out all of the stuff about tax and...

It's quite an intrusive process.

They do all of that.

Gambling.

Oh, gambling, who you've slept with.

It's quite, you know, the drugs that you take.

It's a very intrusive and personal thing.

And that's why it's so important that it's kind of protected as a space where people feel like they can tell the whole truth about themselves.