Laura

And that involves a sort of lack of curiosity about really getting to the bottom of it.

And I spoke to lots of people saying, look,

Even if this vetting report said what it said, it is astonishing to imagine that in the managing of this crisis, that Downing Street is only just in the last couple of weeks.

managed to actually even find out that that wasn't the case.

Now, I'm told that the Foreign Office had been resisting passing this document across.

But there's an awful lot of dispute at the moment about who exactly had done what and this, that and the other.

And I suspect also there may well be on all sides some rather convenient hiding behind, well, we couldn't possibly do this because that wasn't convention.

And then the other side was, we couldn't possibly do this because of that convention.

But

You know, I think at root, this has been a mess for a very, very long time.

The last 72 hours tells us very clearly that Keir Starmer, as a leader, has failed to get a grip on it because he keeps being blindsided by more stuff coming out from Peter Mandelson's whole appointment around the US.

So I was the Prime Minister last time.

Did I do a good job of that or not?

So I don't know how Ollie Robbins will play this.

He may say, I'm bound not to get into any of this detail.

I'm happy to share it with the Intelligence and Security Committee, or I'm happy to write to you confidentially, but I am bound by the same laws I was bound by now, outside government, than I was bound by, well, inside government.

I just don't know how he would play it.

The answer to that question, I think, may, however, be...

Think of big civil service departments as a pyramid.

You've got people sort of the kind of bottom half doing the work with all the papers.