Luke Tryl

And then there's the whole passing on the result of the vetting to ministers like the foreign secretary at the time, David Lambe, or the prime minister.

So there's sort of two strands of argument from friends of Ollie Robbins there.

Yeah, completely.

And we may get, at the beginning of next week, we may get a sense or a greater sense of, well, these arguments playing out in public, because the Prime Minister will be in the Commons on Monday talking about all of this.

And Ollie Robbins has been invited in front of the cross-party Foreign Affairs Select Committee that scrutinises the Foreign Office on Tuesday.

or accepts that particular invitation, let's see.

My understanding is that he is still on the payroll.

He is still, this weekend, a civil servant.

He's no longer running the Foreign Office.

He is still a civil servant because you've got to go through the kind of necessary protocols around somebody departing.

And even looking at the conventions around this, even if he wasn't, given that he has been until very recently...

that the convention would be a committee could still say, look, you need to come and talk to us.

And it may well be, and I'm speculating when I say this, but it very well may be that he wants to come out and talk, particularly given that at the moment there's a huge amount of folk, you and me among them right now, you know, talking about him and his views.

job and what he's meant to do and what he's not meant to do etc etc etc and i i suspect if you put yourself in his shoes you might think i want to get out there and tell my side of the story particularly if you feel aggrieved as his friend kieran martin suggests he does about what's happened so chris that's what could happen next in public what's happening in private in terms of how people are reacting to this

Well, Downing Street's furious.

The Foreign Secretary is furious.

I think on a human level, they're furious because, both of them, because they feel let down.

I think from the Foreign Secretary's perspective, she was a joint signatory alongside Ollie Robbins to a letter to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee last autumn that we now know didn't set out anywhere near as much as

The Foreign Office collectively knew.

So I think there's a sense of being let down there.