Helen MacNamara

And if you're asked to give a reference for somebody in the vetting system, especially when I've done lots of these for your friends, you do feel, actually, I do have to tell this vetting officer the very worst things that I know about my friend.

And I can do that safely because this is all about us managing our national security, not me dobbing my friend in.

So just to go back to what you end up with is you have the developed vetting system produces this outcome, which is based on all the normal things that would happen in a normal place.

We don't think Peter Mandelson should, we put a tick in the red box or whatever.

That doesn't necessarily mean everyone's like, oh, the red box, right?

It doesn't really work like that.

It just means you need to ask some questions, put some mitigations in place.

What Ollie was told, according to what Ollie said, and Ollie would never lie to Parliament, never.

It's unthinkable that he would lie to Parliament.

What Ollie said is that he was told that the case was a borderline one.

So let's assume that's not true.

Well, I would trust Ollie Robbins' judgement on this over the Prime Minister's.

And none of them understood what they were talking about.

That's the problem, is that they'd, I mean, ironically... And whose fault is that?

It's quite emotional, isn't it?

I think that's the other thing about all of this.

There's a lot of feelings involved and a lot of very quixotic emotional reactions.

Well, I'm not against feelings.

I'm against feelings leading you to taking reckless and stupid and anti-constitutional decisions, for sure.

So Hollywood also, because he holds it fast in such a principled way that he will never discuss betting, he has not helped himself by never discussing betting.