Helen MacNamara

It's next week.

Yeah, it's interesting though, the people I've been talking to this week have also been reflecting that if you step away from the kind of grisly details of vetting and clearance and Peter Manelson and the appointment that everyone knows is wrong and shouldn't have happened.

Traffic lies.

All of those things.

You've actually got, in the last few, just really incompetent governing.

And that actually, for the people I've been listening to... For example?

Well, the whole kind of firing of Ollie on it, the sequencing of some of this has made it much harder.

Number 10 have made life so much harder for themselves.

If they'd wanted to show that Ollie Robbins had made a mistake, the way of doing that would be to publish all the papers, publish the information, and then let the facts do the talking, and then put Ollie in the position.

I sound like such a baddie, but this is...

Not if you're wrong and not if that's not how you get rid of a civil servant.

Yeah, I think you should have a little bit of a think about the counterfactual maybe before you do some of these things.

But it's the sense that actually this is another data point on...

him not having the right setup around him, of things not working properly.

There's a really, if you've been inside, and I appreciate this is very inside the roomy, but if you've been inside Number 10 or the Cabinet Office, one of the things that really struck me in the last week is how distant and separate everybody feels.

So you've got the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary almost coming across today like she's an outsider, going around asking questions with a clipboard of people.

And Ollie Robin's operating a million miles away from...

Isn't that just how the government is?

It's like 12 different government departments, sometimes at loggerheads.

You have a few scuffles, but you'd normally have quite a tight team around the Prime Minister.