Paul Lewis

He said that UKSV, which just for people who don't know what that acronym stands for, is the UK security vetting.

So it's the agency within government that does vetting.

He said that it was his understanding that that agency regarded it as a borderline case.

I mean, there's a lot of questions about this claim.

You know, we've really looked into it.

Robbins says that that was a description that was relayed to him.

He didn't look at the summary file himself.

He relied on an oral briefing.

Well, I mean, our understanding is this document was marked official sensitive, which is not a particularly sensitive form of classification for government documents.

You have secret documents, you have top secret documents, you even have strap level documents beyond that.

So this was not labelled as such.

That's his explanation as to why he chose not to look at it.

I mean, other senior civil servants have said that that was extraordinary in their view that he decided to not look at the vetting document, knowing that the officials had advised...

clearance denied he was going to give clearance anyway you might imagine he might want to look at the document but in any case he says he relied on an oral briefing of its contents from another security official in his department now that official has also said he did not look at the document he also relied on an oral briefing now those two people ollie robbins and ian collard are the only two people who've referenced this case being regarded as borderline in any way

There hasn't yet been any independent corroboration of that being the case.

So that will be one of the curious things to look at in the coming weeks is, is there any other information to confirm that that's the case?

And also, frankly, given the seemingly quite wide ranging nature of these concerns, you know, that contributed to UKSV's recommendation, not just a single thing, but multiple things, on what basis would anyone regard that to be borderline?

No.

And that's another really interesting question now.

Now that we have established what the concerns were that were flagged by security officials, the obvious question is, OK, so what were the mitigations that were put in place to deal with such a wide ranging number of mitigations?