Paul Lewis

And as part of this humble address process, these MPs and peers, it's their job to scrutinise the most sensitive of the documents to decide whether there should be any redactions for national security or international relations reasons.

That's their role.

Now, that committee in recent weeks has, and this is quite extraordinary, been saying publicly

that the government has been redacting far too broadly and even withholding some documents in their entirety from the committee.

And then last week, all of this sort of came out in Parliament.

There was an urgent question and a big debate.

Two MPs accused the government of a cover up.

One suggested they might bring effectively a motion to hold ministers in contempt.

I think there's a great deal of concern in Parliament that the government is not being sufficiently transparent.

So the minister, cabinet office minister, who's in charge of this process of releasing these files, has denied that the government has inappropriately redacted information.

He has justified its decision to withhold certain vetting documents.

And he has rejected the notion that there's a cover up.

I think he said if there would be a cover up, he would resign.

So he's flatly said that that is not happening.

One of the reasons, if you read, as I do, because I'm a saddo, transcripts of the debate in parliament, one of the things that is sort of agitating parliamentarians so much is that for them this is a sort of quite existential question, which is who has supremacy?

Is it parliament, democratically elected parliament, that tells the government to do something?

Or does the government have the authority to apply its own discretion and decide in some circumstances against doing what it has been mandated to do?

Yeah, I mean, you know, whenever we publish information that might be regarded as private, we always carefully weigh that against the public interest.

And we did it

On this occasion, I mean, I think what you have here is what one senior parliamentarian has called a wholly exceptional circumstance.