Laura

And that's why Downing Street is so apoplectically furious about this.

You know, Keir Starmer has been all over the airwaves yesterday saying how angry he is.

He's furious.

People in government are flabbergasted at everything that happened.

And you can see why.

Undoubtedly, you can see why any political leader would think, well, hang on a minute, I was sent out with information that turns out not to have been quite 100% true.

There are, though, to use your word of the day, quite a lot of wrinkles with that.

One, how do you define what the actual process is?

If you're Ollie Robbins, you might think, well, I completely followed the process because the process was take a look at all the information, take that report into consideration.

But actually, I followed the process because I thought, well, you know what, the risk can be managed and he's already been given the job anyway.

Correct.

So you could say, if you're Ollie Robbins, I followed the process to a letter.

You could also say, if you're in government, well, hang on a minute, civil servants are meant to make sure that ministers don't mislead the House.

They're meant to make sure that everything's done accurately.

And he didn't do that.

So actually, he didn't follow the process properly at all.

Two views are available when looking at the same circumstances.

The second wrinkle is that there is also a law here.

If you are as sad as I am, and you've been looking carefully at this for the last 24 hours, under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, Section 3, it says very clearly that security vetting is nothing to do with ministers.

It's about officials, and officials are bound by confidentiality.