Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, as the Mandelson Veting Affair rumbles on, we're looking at how damaging the sacking of

Ollie Robbins and the briefing wars that followed it are for relations between government and

Whitehall. Labour came into power saying they would repair the destruction caused by the Tories to the civil service.

But Kirstarmer's comments about mandarin's being too comfortable in a tepid bath of managed decline,

along with the sacking of two cabinet secretaries, have left all that in doubt,

even before this past week's problems.

To discuss all that, I'm delighted to be joined by Lord Robin Butler of Brockwell, a former head of the civil service, having served as cabinet secretary for a decade, as well as being private secretary to five prime ministers. Alongside him, we have Hannah Keenan, Associate Director at the Institute for Government and a former civil servant in the Cabinet Office, as well as Dave Penman, General Secretary of the FDA, the Trade Union for Senior Civil

Servants, and my colleague Susanna Brecknell, co-editor of our sister title and Whitehall

Bible Civil Service World.

So, Susanna, starting with you then. Where kind of are we at the moment, obviously, in this

Mandelson vetting situation? So at the moment, as we speak,

the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons is hearing the latest update from Cat Little permanent secretary at the cabin office. It's the latest in sort of back and forth

in terms of actually what happened. So it's kind of hard to say exactly where we are. We've had

a count on Monday from Ollie Robbins of his view of the vetting process, his involvement in that and also dealing with the humble address documents afterwards.

We've had then statements yesterday in House from the Prime Minister, following also statements yesterday from the House in the Commons on Monday.

And then now we're hearing from Cat Little.

So we're basically in the process of hearing from lots of people to find out exactly what happened in this vetting process. How was the

decision made? What was the Prime Minister told and when about how that decision was made?

I think that Olli Robbins gave his account on Tuesday. He did, yes. Yes. The Prime Minister

was on Monday and then Robbins could have got his retort in on Tuesday. Dave, then, from your point of view, you were sat behind Olly Robbins as he gave his testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee. What did you make of how Robbins conveyed his version of the process to MPs? It was actually quite humbling to sit behind him, to be honest, to hear his account around what he did, because

it's clear he was able to, and I think what was good, was have the space to explain the process

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