You were supposed to redact it, send the top e-mail,

not the whole fucking exchange!

If a government can't leak, do you know what happens?

Dark shit builds up.

What the fuck is going on? There's going to be an inquiry.

And then it bursts!

This is an inquiry into the death of Mr Douglas Tickel,

and the practice and culture of the dissemination of confidential information

between political parties and the public media.

Mr Weir.

Thank you, Lord Goolding.

Our first witness today is, er, is Mr Stewart Pearson.

No, it's... It's fine.

Er, yeah, um, I, Stewart Pearson, do sincerely declare and affirm

that the evidence I shall give will be the truth, the whole truth,

and, and nothing but, er, the truth.

On page 235 of your witness statement,

you describe yourself as the, the human router in government.

Can you, er, can you explain what you meant by that?

Um, I'm a-a router

in the sense that I control the governmental, informational

ingestion and egestion process.

Mr Pearson just to clarify -

your job is to make sure that the public perception

of your government's programme is a positive one. Is that fair?

It's not about perception. Yeah?

I believe in government as a transceiver, hm?

Transceiver.

Yeah, it's really important, sure, to give out a strong signal,

but to be effective, you've got to listen for an echo.

Could you possibly speak in plain English?

I'm sorry, I-I thought I was.

So what IS clear is that you are an important man, Mr Pearson.

I'm just a lad from Leeds with a lust for life, yeah?

There's an African proverb that's stuck with me, yeah?

"If you think you're too small to make a difference,