Ciaran Martin, a former senior civil servant with past involvement in vetting work, who is a close friend of Robbins, told the BBC that the sacked official appeared to have been made a scapegoat.

He said vetting had been wrongly presented as a simple pass or fail, when it was instead a “risk assessment”, and that it was entirely standard for officials to decide whether the balance of risk was acceptable.

“There is no abuse of process, there is no failure of process. Not only is there no duty to disclose the details of a vetting case, there is a duty not to disclose them. The one thing you never do is tell ministers of any kind, because otherwise the vetting system would collapse,” he said.

I'm sorry...WHAT?!?!?! How can civil servants hold that level of judgement. I've long thought that the civil service has too much power over policy, resulting in the Home Office and Foreign Office having minimal change in policy no matter who is Home/Foreign secretary.

If this is really the case then hopefully this is a catalyst for a change in how the civil service operates and where decision making really lies.