Laura

I think it will, because yet again, Starmageddon is unfolding in front of our eyes.

Yet again, as one senior MP said to me, oh no, here we go again, because of the saga around Keir Starmer's original decision many, many months ago to give one Peter Mandelson the plum job of being Britain's ambassador to the United States.

And it's Laura in the studio.

And how nice to be back together.

Now, shall we have a quick little recap and then we can talk about all the different elements of this fiasco.

So this week, on Thursday night, Keir Starmer fired the top Mandarin at the Foreign Office, Sir Ollie Robbins.

He fired him because of an excellent scoop from our journalistic colleagues at The Guardian that revealed that Peter Mandelson had failed the specific security vetting carried out by a government agency.

Despite that, one Sir Ollie Robbins had cleared Peter Mandelson for the job of becoming the American ambassador, but he did not tell anyone in Downing Street or any government minister that he had done that.

Off with his head, in with his P45, out the door he went.

That's right.

So I think there are some things that we have to try and understand if you want to even begin to make sense of this story.

First off, what is vetting?

So vetting, generically, is the process by which people who get important jobs in government, whether they're officials or politicians, and people dig into their backgrounds.

Now, the element of this, which we know that was failed by Peter Mandelson, was the security check carried out by what's essentially a Quango, the United Kingdom vetting agency.

They're commissioned to do that work by the Foreign Office, a bit like a bank might ask a credit agency to look into what you've been naughtily spending your money on.

But the decision stays with the Foreign Office about whether or not that person is still okay to get the job, a bit like a bank would make the ultimate decision about whether you get their loan, but they'd be informed by the report that the credit checking agency have been done on you.

Now, the accusation against Sir Ollie Robbins in this case is that not only is it extraordinary to think that he might have been happy to let a controversial person like Peter Mandelson go forward for a job if he'd failed that specific vetting check.

but also for him not to have stuck his hand up in the last months of meltdown and said, oh, by the way, Prime Minister, or even by the way, Cabinet Secretary, or even by the way, Foreign Secretary, there might be something you need to know about what happened many, many months ago.

Now, his defence...

is that the whole process of vetting is meant to be confidential.