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00:00So our latest episode has just come out but since we recorded another big row has erupted on Peter Mandelson
00:07again and the Prime Minister's knowledge or not knowledge of what has happened and we thought it was too important
00:14given how much we've talked about Mandelson on the podcast so far to let that pass by without giving you,
00:20well it's not an emergency podcast, it's an emergency broadcast I guess, Cleo.
00:25Yesterday the Guardian reported that the Prime Minister had been told on Tuesday, today is Friday, that contrary to what
00:32he'd said all along about proper processes being followed, which we talk about in episode 2, Peter Mandelson had in
00:39fact failed his security vetting to be US ambassador.
00:43But the Foreign Office apparently overruled this at the time.
00:48The security vetting took place in early 2025 after the Prime Minister had already announced Mandelson into the role, which
00:56is very much kind of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
01:01Starmer is reportedly furious and he's actually done a clip this afternoon explaining that he knew nothing about the failed
01:07vetting, although he has despite that repeatedly told Parliament that proper process has been followed.
01:13So there is quite a big question mark hanging over things there.
01:16Overnight, the Foreign Office's, the FCDO's top civil servant, Olly Robbins, has been sacked.
01:22He's lost the confidence of the Prime Minister and of the Foreign Secretary because of what has happened in terms
01:28of the security vetting.
01:30And so as of now, we are waiting for, still waiting for the next tranche of the Mandelson files to
01:36be released.
01:37Apparently the Prime Minister is going before the House of Commons on Monday now to explain this situation.
01:42And we have fairly predictably lots of calls for the Prime Minister to resign.
01:48The Liberal Democrats have referred the Prime Minister to his own ethics advisor to investigate his conduct, which, even by
01:56the Liberal Democrats standards, is pretty smooth.
02:00And we are kind of very much watching this space to see the reaction from the Labour Party's own backbenchers
02:06and people as to what has happened overnight.
02:08Well, political Twitter has gone mad, it's safe to say, and there's a fair amount of conspiracy going on.
02:15People have got their tinfoil hats on.
02:17And understandably, a decent amount of credulity, just this explanation and what people could and couldn't have known.
02:25And I think a really good place to start is what developed vetting is.
02:30Helen, you were the Deputy Cabinet Secretary.
02:33You were in charge of the Propriety and Ethics Team, who I imagine are having an absolute disaster of a
02:38day.
02:39Can we just start with what developed vetting is?
02:42How commonplace is it?
02:44And is it true that people can just pass or fail it?
02:47The first thing I should say is that there is a whole system of security clearances that, as you would
02:53expect, apply to everybody who works in anything to do with sensitive information.
02:56This particular test is to get the higher level of security clearance called developed vetting.
03:02And pretty much any very senior official has to have it.
03:06And some ministers have to have it.
03:08And what's being said to have happened here is that in January or February 2025, so this is laughter, Peter
03:16Manderson has been chosen by the Prime Minister as the ambassador and announced as such.
03:20Then there is the process by which he needs to go through the security checking in order to effectively fulfil
03:25the technicality of being able to access security information.
03:29Now, there is a special bit of government called the UK Security and Vetting Service.
03:33They're part of the MOD that does this vetting and they do this on behalf of government departments.
03:39They did it on behalf of the Foreign Office.
03:41What then happens as a result of that vetting is that the person commissioning it gets the report back.
03:46Sometimes it is as simple as clear, no problems.
03:51Sometimes it is more complicated than that.
03:53It's like, well, there was a question about this or there is something about this or perhaps this kind of
03:58sensitive information.
03:59Because it's not quite as binary as it is being portrayed as.
04:04It is always, and this might be a controversial thing to say, but it's also true that just because you
04:09have been given developed vetting doesn't mean that automatically people will share all information with you.
04:14There are levels of trustworthiness.
04:16There's levels of people who are considered to be entirely safe and secure to give information to.
04:22And there might be people that you're a bit more wary of anyway.
04:24So to present this as there is just a one moment when you are given a special pass and then
04:28access to the secrets of the world, that is not the case.
04:32What we've been told here is Peter Mansell did not get the totally clean bill of health from the developed
04:37vetting process that you would expect or you would hope for somebody who's going to be your ambassador.
04:42And in light of that, that the then Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office decided that nevertheless, on balance, he
04:50should be given developed vetting or he shouldn't not be given developed vetting more accurately.
04:55First of all, we actually still don't know the full details of exactly what happened here and why.
04:59But my first alarm bell question is the people who are doing the developed vetting probably had exactly the same
05:07fact set of information about Peter Mandelson as the Prime Minister.
05:11So unless we discover in the next couple of days that actually the developed vetting team had found something else
05:16out, extremely problematic and troubling,
05:19it's highly likely, from my experience of knowing how developed vetting works and the questions that they raise,
05:25that just from the fact set that we've already seen went to the Prime Minister, that is enough to raise
05:30a question and to say,
05:32I'm not sure if we should be giving this person developed vetting because there are some serious questions about their
05:36judgment.
05:37So one of the things that may well have happened here is that on the same fact set as the
05:42Prime Minister had,
05:43the developed vetting people raise a flag.
05:46They say that to the Permanent Secretary of the FCDO.
05:50He says, as he has already said in public, there have been grave concerns raised within the Foreign Office about
05:56whether this was the right person for the job.
05:58All of these concerns have been explained to the Prime Minister as far as everybody understood.
06:02And yet the Prime Minister has still decided to appoint Peter Mandelson.
06:06So this isn't a great kind of secret other scandal.
06:10It is that the developed vetting process raised exactly the same questions.
06:14The Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, doing his job at the command of the Prime Minister,
06:19did not start to go back to the Prime Minister and ask him exactly the same question again.
06:23So I think that's one of the things that needs to be asked and answered here,
06:27is has Olly Robbins been sacked for doing exactly what the Prime Minister wanted him to do last January on
06:34the basis of information that the Prime Minister was aware of?
06:37Because even by the standards, if that's the case, that's totally unacceptable.
06:42Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
06:44And just a very quick note on Olly Robbins, who is an interesting bogeyman for me, Helen.
06:51I think you probably know him much better than I do.
06:54But having worked on the Brexit campaign, having worked on Brexit during Theresa May's administration and then Boris Johnson's,
07:00he was this sort of figure to fear and he is not beloved by Brexit minded people.
07:08And that is not because he was incompetent.
07:11That is not because he was in some way nefarious or malicious.
07:14It was because he was excellent at his job and he was therefore, you know, quite a challenging person to
07:20work with.
07:20And I just think the idea that he will have thought, I'm a brand new Permanent Secretary at the Foreign
07:27Office.
07:28This is an announcement that has already been made.
07:31There are major flags here about the vetting process, but I'm just not going to tell anybody and I'm just
07:36going to quietly push this through.
07:38I think it's for the birds.
07:39And he says this as much when he is pulled before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the House of
07:46Commons in January this year,
07:48where he is asked about what process was in place.
07:53Do you have misgivings?
07:54And he essentially says the Prime Minister had already decided this is the person he wanted to appoint.
08:01You know, it had already been announced.
08:04What am I supposed to do?
08:06I was following through essentially what did the Prime Minister want to happen here?
08:10And I think there were there were interesting questions on this on there was some credulity about is it really
08:18possible the Prime Minister and his senior team and indeed the people in the Propriety and Ethics Department
08:25and the Foreign Secretary themselves did not know that Peter Manderson had failed the vetting process.
08:32And chief among those are PMQs in February when when Kemi Badenow asked the Prime Minister as part of the
08:39security vetting process was Peter Manderson asked about his Epstein links.
08:43And the Prime Minister answers yes, which implies that he knew that the vetting process had happened.
08:49To go to your question, is it believable that the Permanent Secretary of the FCDO didn't tell ministers that the
08:58vetting process hadn't been totally clean?
09:01I mean, I think that is believable, actually, partly because there is a whole load of restrictions around what you
09:06say about vetting.
09:09It's really, really hinges on was this new information or known information?
09:14Is that where the flags were being raised?
09:16And I find it very hard to believe that nobody in the centre of government knew whether whether information was
09:24passed on to the Prime Minister.
09:26Different question. If the Prime Minister said it wasn't, then presumably it wasn't.
09:30But I would be really surprised if there wasn't somebody in number 10 or the Cabinet Office who would have
09:37been told that this has happened and this is how it was being handled.
09:40If I think back to and again, it's uncommon, but it's not totally exceptional for there to be questions raised
09:48about in the developed vetting process for a political appointment,
09:51partly because people in politics have led more interesting, high profile and different lives to people who spend their whole
10:00time assuming they're going to work in a security context and are therefore very cautious.
10:04Shall we come on to Parliament? Because I think that of all the questions that are being asked here, I
10:07mean, Olly Wobbin's being sacked for doing his job.
10:10Let's just put that to one side.
10:12But for Parliament here, I think there were two or three things.
10:16Firstly, I am still genuinely flabbergasted why it has taken so long to comply with the Humble Address.
10:23The Humble Address is not a kind of shall I or shanty process.
10:26It's an absolute instruction from Parliament to provide some information.
10:30I cannot understand why it's taken so long to provide this information.
10:34And by the way, if all this information had been provided, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
10:39That's true. I just want to quickly add, if you want to know more about the Humble Address and this
10:43whole process, do tune in to episode four when we discuss the first tranche of the Mandelson files.
10:49And Helen goes into great joyous depth explaining how Humble Addresses work and exactly what information is required here, because
10:55she's exactly right.
10:57You know, we're now we've just recorded episode nine.
10:59So it just seems amazing to me that in some ways we're just exactly where we were back in February.
11:06Sorry, Helen. Do carry on. Let's get back to Parliament.
11:08So back in Parliament.
11:11So apparently, according to the reporting, the Prime Minister found out on Tuesday night that what he had said to
11:18Parliament about all the processes being properly followed was not true.
11:25And they've been pretty open that that's what he found out on Tuesday night.
11:28The Prime Minister was in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
11:31The only reason we know about what we know about is because of a leak to the Guardian newspaper.
11:36So my other kind of really big question mark about handling this week is at the point at which you
11:43as Prime Minister know that there is a risk that you might have misled the House of Commons.
11:47And the kind of urgency that ought to be involved in thinking we need to correct this hard and correct
11:53it now is you'd have expected something to happen on Wednesday or Thursday.
11:59The first round of the files, as you say, we go into this in quite a lot of detail in
12:03one of our earlier episodes, was published on a Wednesday afternoon after PMQs.
12:07I have some sympathy, publishing on Wednesday morning, admitting this on Wednesday morning, probably no fun, but you definitely could
12:13have done it on Wednesday afternoon.
12:15And why they haven't done that, why they haven't complied fully and properly and openly with the terms of the
12:22Humble Address.
12:23I think it's only because it's actually been in the Conservative opposition's interests to let this drag on, that it's
12:29dragged on.
12:29But it's pretty staggering to do that and pretty exposing for the Prime Minister personally in terms of the gap
12:34between what he has said to the House of Commons and what is now turning out to be the facts.
12:40I agree. And not only what he said to the House of Commons in the last couple of months, what
12:45he said to the House of Commons in the last few years.
12:47You know, he was very aggressive as leader of the opposition about how Boris Johnson made statements to the House
12:55of Commons over Partygate and Chris Pinscher.
12:58And, you know, Boris Johnson went for much less in many ways if we're talking about misleading the House.
13:04And it seems amazing for someone who is apparently such a stickler for process not to immediately come to the
13:11House on Wednesday afternoon and correct the record.
13:13More than that, from a political point of view, he's waiting until Monday, which means a terrible weekend of reports
13:20in the Sunday papers, I would imagine,
13:22and plenty of times for his MPs to stew and get incredibly cross about this and everyone to prepare themselves
13:29to pepper him really hard on Monday afternoon with questions when he does make his statement.
13:35It's a very vulnerable position to push yourself into.
13:37It is. And I just want to come back to the sacking of Olly Robbins, if I may, because it's
13:45really upsetting, actually, as a former civil servant to see this happen.
13:50Because, as I say, as far as I can make out, what he's being sacked for is over-complying with
13:55the Prime Minister's wishes.
13:57Now, it may be that, actually, there are things that, in retrospect, Olly himself or people might say he should
14:02have judged this differently or that differently, or perhaps this could have happened.
14:06Of course, like, mistakes are made. And mistakes are made often with the kind of best of intentions, especially when
14:12it comes to fulfilling the will of the Prime Minister.
14:14We've seen that happen repeatedly over the years. It's hard.
14:18But for someone like of the calibre of Olly Robbins, I mean, you're right, he was feared by the Brexiteers
14:23because he is so good.
14:24He's in generational talent as a civil servant. He has extraordinary skills and experience.
14:29He is doing a terrific job in the FCDO.
14:32I do not think that we are a state of affairs in our country where we can afford to let
14:37the sort of talent that we have in Olly just walk away from public service.
14:42It's one of those kind of horrifying things where you really see the balance between what's in the national interest,
14:49what's in perhaps the governing party's interest, or what's in individual people's interests.
14:54And this is just, to me, from the outside, at least, it feels like a real kind of a real
14:59slap for the civil service, which, frankly, there's been far too much of that recently.
15:03And it's not it's it's not nice or good or proper. And people deserve to be treated much better than
15:09this.
15:10Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it's a great challenge for Antonio Romeo, who is the new cabinet secretary.
15:15She's new in post. I understand she's apparently having her first permanent secretary away day today.
15:21And it's going to be very odd without one of the most senior mandarins in Britain there.
15:25And in terms of trying to restore confidence and culture within the civil service, to lose someone for basically doing
15:34their job incredibly well seems astonishing to me.
15:37And and as part of that, you know, our episode that's that's come out earlier today is about defense and
15:43the security of the land and to leak to lose our most senior foreign office official seems extraordinary to me.
15:50Quickly give credit to David Maddox from the independent, our very own independent, who actually, it turns out, broke this
15:57story about Peter Madison's vetting months ago.
16:02And it just never really got picked up. And I think that's such an interesting part of where just sometimes
16:10the media and where the zeitgeist is.
16:12Sometimes these things get picked up and run with, just like yesterday afternoon when the Guardian wrote this story.
16:18And there was just sort of no comment at all at the time. And I suppose the difference is now
16:22that there is a big clash between what the Guardian are reporting, i.e.
16:28Peter Madison failed his vetting process and what the prime minister has been saying for the last three months, which
16:34is all due process was followed.
16:36And whilst there is major friction there, I think Downing Street will continue to find themselves in quite a bind.
16:44And I think there's two serious points in that. Right. Firstly, there is you're absolutely right.
16:49The fact that or the fact that Peter Madison did not did not get the blessing from security services was
16:56reported months ago.
16:57There is a staggering lack of curiosity that that wasn't followed up if that was reported and nobody in Whitehall
17:05or nobody number 10 and nobody dealing with this real and present danger from the humble address thought to start
17:10their discovery of the documents with that question kind of beggars belief.
17:15There's a there's either a competence or a curiosity question here or both.
17:21But you either have to be much more curious about exactly what happened to have got to April and still
17:27not really know the timeline, still not really have the documents, still to be shocked to discover things that actually
17:33happened more than a year ago.
17:34In this context, when it is, it's kind of life and death for a prime minister, this stuff to be
17:39so unbothered by it, I find genuinely bewildering.
17:42I was just thinking if we were in our old jobs, so deputy cabinet secretary, deputy chief of staff from
17:50January, probably sooner, we'd have been meeting multiple times a day to establish the facts on this.
17:55And we'd be saying, can we can we absolutely be sure we can send the prime minister into the House
18:00of Commons to say all process has been followed?
18:04Because you would immediately ask, well, was it followed? Let's let's do a bit of an information gathering exercise here.
18:09And I just find that you're right. It's this it's this curiosity point.
18:14I find it amazing that nobody and these are intelligent people.
18:19They are in charge of running the country. Won't have asked a few questions here.
18:23I mean, the prime minister himself was the director of public prosecutions.
18:26Asking questions is what he does for a living. He's constantly being asked to stop asking questions in the House
18:30of Commons at PMQs.
18:33So do you think there is something about competence in this and competent handling?
18:39Because even if you even if you think about the last 24 hours, immediately sacking Ollie Robbins last night.
18:46I mean, I obviously think it was wrong.
18:49It also wasn't smart because actually the far by far the more sensible thing to do.
18:54And this is what I would have been advising were I in the room. Thank goodness I'm not right now
18:59is don't whatever you do.
19:01Don't start jettisoning people now. You need to say if you are going to sack people, save them up for
19:06the point at which you really need to sack them.
19:08Let Ollie explain in public, actually, what he's done and what he's not done.
19:12And then you can make a judgment. Whereas this really fast, reactive, I'm just going to throw you under a
19:18bus.
19:18It's not even good throwing under a bus, to be honest. There's a competence question even about even about that.
19:25You know, this is you would get the permanent secretary to explain.
19:28You'd get all the documents published and then you would decide if the conclusion is this was a really serious
19:33error of judgment by a civil servant.
19:35Then maybe people could see that instead of reacting like I am in the white heat of hang on a
19:39second.
19:40Somebody was following your judgment and then they were sacked for it. That doesn't seem reasonable at all.
19:45We talked a bit when we last discussed the Mandelson files, which feels like a constant narrative of conversation we've
19:50been having for months now.
19:51When we discussed it on the podcast, we talked a lot about process. Love to talk about process.
19:56And we talked about the process failings and we talked about the absence of writing things down.
20:01And this is my second kind of question in terms of Parliament.
20:05So Keir Starmer has stood up in the House repeatedly and said that the proper process was followed.
20:10Now, including this proper security vesting process and all of these things that followed, the chief secretary to the prime
20:15minister this morning has had the audacity to say that it's a failure of the state somehow, rather than a
20:21failure of judgment of key people of what's happened here.
20:23But the point remains that the prime minister of this country has stood up in the House of Commons and
20:29has repeatedly said words which now turn out to be not true.
20:33Now, I should be a bit careful about that because that is probably there's a parliamentary process.
20:37Whether he knew they were not true or not, I think is the question.
20:40I think they are that they are not true.
20:42I think we can acknowledge now, people often deride and mock and like say the civil service is really annoying
20:51because they're constantly trying to write things down and have a process and want to have a meeting and everybody
20:55involved in the same thing.
20:56But actually, one of the things that's very, very obviously not happened here is you haven't had people having to
21:02sign off exactly what is written in the PM's briefing pack for PMQs.
21:07Exactly. All of the people who could know something that is material should be somewhere on someone's email chain saying
21:15we're about to say this.
21:16Can you just confirm that this is in fact OK to say?
21:19And then what you have done, if you're the people in number 10, is you have dragged the net as
21:23wide as possible and you've made so many other people culpable for what the boss is about to say.
21:28That is part of the game. And that so very, very clearly has not happened here and has not happened
21:35here.
21:35I couldn't agree more with that. And actually this I think this sort of what I'm calling the salami slice
21:40strategy speaks to what's going to happen next week.
21:44So on Monday, the Prime Minister is going to go to the House of Commons and he's going to make
21:49a statement, having had the weekend with people causing all kinds of problems, I imagine.
21:54At the moment, Ollie Robbins is being asked to go to speak to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
22:00Yeah, I mean, your advice always, and this is because you've seen some of the worst stuff in action when
22:06you were doing these former jobs, is to establish the facts as quickly as you can.
22:11And then even once mistakes have been made, correct yourself as quickly as you can, which I think is the
22:18exact opposite to the Prime Minister's strategy, which seems to be what you could call a sort of salami slicing.
22:24So if we look ahead to next week, well, we've got a couple of days of pretty bad media, I
22:32would imagine.
22:33And then on Monday, the Prime Minister is going to the House of Commons to make a statement on this,
22:38where he's going to be asked some very, very difficult questions, one will imagine, assuming no new information has come
22:45out before then.
22:45On Tuesday, Emily Thornberry, who is in charge of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has asked Ollie Robbins to come
22:54and appear before them.
22:56And I think he's already been very clear on what happened in this process, but he's now going as a
23:02former Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office.
23:05And so exactly to your point, why would you let these people go? Because he's not in your camp anymore,
23:12quite frankly.
23:13Cleo, can I just tell you, even by the standards, that is rookie.
23:17They're very fortunate that Ollie is like a public servant to his fingertips, and I doubt he'll do anything other
23:22than behave honourably and properly.
23:24But you have...
23:25Which could be a massive problem for them.
23:29Yeah, well, I expect so. We just created more of a problem than you actually had, unbelievably.
23:36I also just wanted to very quickly talk about, and there's lots of chit-chat about, you know,
23:42where there are votes of no confidence comes, which, by the way, is very, very challenging to do.
23:47It would take...
23:48Because it's half of the number of MPs plus one, it would be something like 521...
23:54Sorry, 321 MPs, and the Prime Minister has over 400.
23:59So, I mean, unless they really have a hemorrhaging of support over the weekend,
24:03I don't think they need to worry about something like that.
24:06But there are potentially more interesting problems that will come in parliamentary shenanigans and humble addresses and so on.
24:15I don't think this is going to get easier.
24:17And as part of that sort of salami slicing strategy, with every little thing they do, you know,
24:25they lose the...
24:26Well, they lose Peter Mandelson, then they lose Morgan McSweeney, and now they've lost Ollie Robbins.
24:31And then next will come the second tranche of Mandelson Files.
24:36The stakes get raised each time, because more questions come out, actually, than get answered.
24:43That's the other thing that's baffling about the handling, is it was really possible very early on in this process
24:49to just say,
24:50look, it transpires, appointing Peter Mandelson was a mistake, I'm very sorry about it.
24:56But, you know, say all the sensible and right things, and then move on.
25:00Instead of which, by turning around and kind of blaming the system, and blaming everybody else,
25:06and blaming being lied to, and blaming the process, and now blaming the process again,
25:11and now blaming Ollie Robbins.
25:14Like, this is completely self-inflicted harm.
25:18Completely self-inflicted harm, because none of it...
25:21The fundamentals here was it doesn't matter how many other people are blamed,
25:25people are going to turn around and say, well, it was your fault, Prime Minister, anyway.
25:28There's no way out of that.
25:30So instead of taking that on the chin and getting the kind of applauded for saying,
25:33well, sometimes I've made mistakes, I've made a mistake, I'm very sorry, move on,
25:36there's more important stuff we need to be talking about.
25:38He's allowed himself to get repeatedly punched in the face.
25:43And that's not going to get any easier in the next couple of days or weeks.
25:46And I think that's when the question comes as to people's judgment,
25:49and his own party's judgment, about his competence, his curiosity.
25:53How many other things is he standing up and saying without checking whether they're right or not?
25:57He said, does anybody care, actually, whether the thing for the Prime Minister...
26:01Does this apply to everything?
26:03That he can just turn around and say, well, I didn't know, I didn't ask any questions,
26:06I just said exactly what they gave me to say.
26:08Who is the they?
26:10Why do any of these people not ask questions?
26:12There's such a kind of basic, this is not the right way to get to the outcome that you want
26:16to get to.
26:16In fact, it's actually making your life and your problem worse.
26:20It makes no sense.
26:22Yeah, and in the meantime, the parlour continues.
26:24So the SNP's Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, has said,
26:29the Prime Minister is either incompetent, gullible or a liar.
26:33Yeah. I mean, that isn't good if those are any of your excuses to fall back on.
26:39No. I mean, no, absolutely not.
26:42And just to recap, what we are saying is that we don't...
26:48Frustratingly, we don't know because none of the documents have been published,
26:51and so we've got all of these fine words about transparency,
26:54but actually we can't really see.
26:56So we don't know.
26:57We're still yet again operating in the dark.
26:59But the high likelihood is that the reason that Peter Manilson did not pass his developed vetting
27:06in those early days of 2025 were exactly the same reasons that were put to the Prime Minister,
27:12that the Prime Minister thought, well, even knowing all of that, I'm still going to appoint him anyway.
27:18And in the light of that judgment, the Permanent Secretary serving the Prime Minister
27:22did what he thought was the right thing to do, which was to say,
27:26well, we can't let the fact that this technicality of developed vetting on the same facts
27:32get in the way of the appointment the Prime Minister wants,
27:34so I'm going to make this work for the Prime Minister,
27:36and I am going to take that risk and responsibility on myself.
27:40I mean, that's the other thing which is so hard to hear as a former civil servant,
27:44is if you're doing your job really well,
27:47some of the time what you are doing as a very senior civil servant
27:51is deciding to take the risk onto yourself rather than pass everything up the chain.
27:55Sometimes you're saying that the right thing to do here is,
27:58I will not say this to the Prime Minister in all of the detail,
28:01I will take responsibility for holding some of this information myself
28:05because that is the right thing to do.
28:07You have massively disincentivised that now.
28:10I can't imagine there's any civil servant who's going to do anything other
28:13than want to make sure that their arse is well and truly covered
28:16in every single circumstance.
28:18If this can happen to Ollie Robbins with all of his skills,
28:22all of his ability, all of the things that he actually offers to the country
28:26day in, day out, and yet still he's somehow being fired
28:29for the Prime Minister's misjudgment,
28:31then what signal does that send to everybody else?
28:34It's not good.
28:35I completely agree.
28:37And this, and actually this is perhaps the note to end on.
28:39It has struck me in both episode two,
28:41when we talked about process around the Mandelson appointment,
28:43it struck me in episode four,
28:45when we talked about the first tranche of the Mandelson files,
28:47and it strikes me now that all of this comes down
28:51to the Prime Minister's judgment.
28:53What an absolutely, kind of deafeningly awful element
28:57for us all to be hanging on is it's all down to him.
29:00The buck stops with him.
29:02None of this gets better for him.
29:03So if you would like him,
29:03Good, good.
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