Even if there has been no mistake at all in the guidance to civil servants about what documents they can share with pro-Brexit ministers during the referendum campaign, the government has clearly made a number of mistakes at least in the presentation of that guidance, as this afternoon’s urgent question in the Commons showed.
The first mistake that ministers made was purely a process one: they failed to get any supportive MPs who are in favour of the guidance to attend the session, which meant that Matt Hancock spent the whole urgent question being beaten up by pro-Brexit MPs who are furious a minister will not be able to obtain information that an MP can quite easily get through a parliamentary question. Michael Fabricant accused ministers of making a ‘huge blunder’, Liam Fox argued that there was a ‘serious constitutional issue here which goes to the heart of House of Commons accountability’.
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