Sam Laidlaw's West Coast rail bid inquiry lacks Hercule Poirot's detective skills What of the simple stuff? Transport Committee chairman Louise Ellman wanted to know if it "troubled" Laidlaw that he had not been able to do the full email "capture" that might have nailed if there really had been an "Anyone But Branson" campaign. Why, that could have helped explain why officials exercised "discretion" in the way they evaluated the rival bids from FirstGroup and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Rail. "We could see no evidence of bias," demurred Laidlaw, pointing out that "we had the benefit of reviewing all the emails given to the HR inquiry," which "gave us 90pc of what was required." Only 90pc? So began what has now become a familiar tale. Officials used a model to calculate risks to GDP forecasts that was "not fit for purpose." They ploughed on regardless with the bid - despite warnings, including an "amber/red" alert from the Treasury, that the project risked a nasty derailment. And there was "a lack of any one senior reporting officer gripping this project." Then, at a crucial meeting on June 27 of the DfT's Contract Awards Committee, officials broke their own rules - on the advice of an un-named in-house lawyer - and used "discretion" to determine the size of the subordinated loan facility, the amount pledged by bidders as insurance against them walking out on the West Coast contract. FirstGroup put up £190m, a third of what Virgin Rail believed it should have been asked for, given the risks in its bid. Pivotal though that meeting was, Laidlaw's interviews with the 14 participants saw him find "different people putting different emphasis on different factors." The result of that, he told MPs, was: "It isn't entirely clear what happened at that meeting." Afterwards a partner from the DfT's external legal adviser Eversheds explained it had been wrong to use discretion but only informed relatively junior officials, who then failed to "escalate" such advice up the chain of command. The upshot, said Laidlaw, was that ministers had asked "pretty penetrating questions" but "the people they were asking questions of were themselves misinformed" - so ministers "were asking the wrong people." "Was it a mess-up or malpractice?" asked Ellman. "There was a sequence of errors," was Laidlaw's best shot at that. Of course Poirot has been here before. How did he put it? Only by interrogating the other passengers could I hope to see the light, but when I began to question them, the light, as Macbeth would have said, thickened. That, though, is the trouble with rail inquiries.