Jonathan Freedland

And we didn't want to ask too many questions or look too deeply.

That isn't a great explanation.

But I think that is a part of it.

The other thing I think is a really difficult question for him, it sounds a bit process-ish, is, Kemi Bade not asked this, if he knew...

Last Tuesday, thanks to the Guardian's extraordinary exclusive that he'd been denied vetting, he really is under the rules required to correct the record of previous statements and go to the House of Commons immediately, first possible opportunity.

And that would have been Prime Minister's questions last Wednesday.

And he stood there and didn't say anything.

By the way, guys, I found out something that means what I told you last time was wrong.

If he had done that, we wouldn't have had our big scoop.

But under the rules, the ministerial code, he was required to do that and he didn't do that.

And I think there is not yet a good answer to that.

Yes.

So his defence there is that that's what he honestly, sincerely believed, because that's what he'd been told.

And interestingly, the House has more or less accepted that, that he wasn't, whatever misleading happened, it wasn't knowing.

And I think it's important that Camille Badenoch, who previously was saying that he was lying, that he knew he was lying, that he was misleading willfully, she's dropped that line now.

The combination of that, the fact that people have accepted it was not knowing deception, and the fact that he did apologise for the main thing of appointing Madison, almost gets him in the clear.

The problem is the other bit of it.

So he didn't knowingly mislead, but did he mislead?

There it's this almost sort of hair-splitting theological argument about full process.

And there I think the words of Ollie Robbins to the Parliamentary Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, are really important because it seems to me that Ollie Robbins was being very Sir Humphrey, if people get the reference there to the character in Yes Minister, the kind of civil servant who said the full vetting process was conducted.