Laura

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

They're not meant to be spilling their guts to ministers about what has gone on.

If you talk to people in government about that, they say, aha, but yes, you can tell them the outcome of the decision.

And officials are also bound by the civil service code, which is a code, not a law.

But it also says very clearly that they need to make sure that ministers have got, you know, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

So I suggest in the end, a lot of this is going to come down to that sort of battle that we always have in Westminster between

process, political reality, and then perception.

So is the perception here that Keir Starmer went out and said things that were not true?

Absolutely.

Do people who are backers of Ollie Robbins, who's got a reputation as a very capable, very process-focused stickler for the rules in government, do they think that he followed the process?

Yes, they do.

But is the political reality that

that in this whole disaster, Keir Starmer needed someone to point the finger at and blame.

Yes, he did.

Well, that depends who you ask.

So the government took a very unusual step.

They published the minute of a meeting that happened last week where you can see in black and white that the prime minister hadn't known up until that point.

And you can see there that he's saying, OK, and I'm paraphrasing, we've got to find out exactly what's happened and then we've got to correct the record.

So they've tried to sort of preempt that by putting that document out into the public domain.

I have no doubt that the opposition parties are going to try and give him a hard time over not coming clean absolutely straight away.