Laura

The higher you go up the pyramid, the skinnier it gets.

By the time you get to the top of the boss, they're not necessarily going to be given a big 100-page report of something.

They might be given one side of A4.

They might even have a trusted official or trusted staff member

telling them something without them seeing all the documents.

We don't know exactly what he was told, but that is not impossible.

And again, it's just, it's not impossible that that vetting process turned up much that wasn't already in the other report that had been done by a different bit of government.

So again, there's a second question, if you want to go back to our role play, we'll do it the other way.

Sir Ollie Robbins

Why did you not demand to see the full vetting report if you did not see the full vetting report, knowing how controversial this appointment might have been?

Indeed, there were people in the Foreign Office who thought it was a terrible idea to put Peter Maddison in that job.

We should also just say, Sir Olly Robbins doesn't sound like that at all.

Yes, you're inhabiting the role very well.

Don't we all?

Correct, which is where the whole thing gets into, you know, a kind of Kafka, Orwellian, or, you know, Yes Minister sitcom from the 80s.

You know, pick your...

pick your bizarre reality where people can't really say anything.

You know, well, I do know what I don't know, but I don't know what I do know.

And you can't know anything that I know because then you would know what I know.

You know, I mean, you just get into this ridiculous cycle.