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Oh Kiwi... Welcome to the world that produced Alice in Wonderland (written by a brilliant Oxford don & mathematician who, when Queen Victoria said she'd enjoyed it so much and asked him to send her his next book, sent her the scholarly An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.) And welcome to the world of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. (Widely regarded by politicians and officials alike as the single most accurate representation of British Governance culturally, albeit coated in comedy to make the pill go down). Yes, Minister GIF - From a not irrelevant example by way of a comment on Royal Air Force Cadet Training in a blog. For a while, I was a Central Government Civil Servant and trust me, it is almost all about language games - sometimes played at Grand Master level - games in which the games is so designed as to avoid risking embarrassment. (In some ways this is the entire English schtick. See: What English People Really Mean When They Say Sorry.) Principally, the task, the 'win', is to avoid embarrassing Ministers - while, preferably but not necessarily, making them look good. Achieving anything is way down the list, near or at the bottom. Picking a sandwich for lunch comes higher in the pecking order. In short, the job - "that ugly Anglo-Saxon word of double meaning" as Graham Greene, whose own Mastery of English was so beautiful it was called "Greeneland" and is a country of words almost instantly recognisable ("Unhappiness sat down next to him like an old friend."); so a bit like your wonderful John Updike - the job is not in any way to answer your question/s, serve the public, be open or transparent. That's the first elementary error many people make. The loopholes in our FoI act are wide enough to drive a double decker bus through (one was on the bridge, incidentally, my father flew through!) There are many training courses for how to 'reply'. (Some were residential but they've just closed the Civil Service school - opened as the only significant change to the Civil Service when reform reached the Cabinet for a two-hour session in modern history back in [checks notes] the 1970s, when the Cabinet Secretary egged on Tony Benn and Barbara Castle in their squabble about the great Grimsby fishing industry - the States were stained by this; Iceland; Cold War - so they ran out the clock) There are training courses for how to reply to a Parliamentary Question. (The next obvious stage but I can't see any MPs going there). Courses for Royal Correspondence that interfaces with His Majesty's Government - a separate category and receives special attention. Courses, no doubt, on the FoI. The Ministry of Defence is a whole other horror show. (You know of my father: he tangled with them for well over a decade to get his rightful pension). The recently late and lovely man Tim Slessor's Lying In State is gripping on this. Slessor's father's death, in the second worst Naval disaster of the Second World War, was still subject to MoD dissimulation even half a century later, when the major figures involved had all written what really happened in the memoirs decades earlier. The still pertinent The Civil Servants: An Enquiry into Britain's Ruling Class by Peter Kellner and Lord Crowther Hunt exposes forensically why the incredibly boring sounding Civil Service Reform is the most important golden bullet there is. Dominic Cummings - whose substack is extraordinary and who has written and commented and given Parliamentary Evidence more honestly than anyone else in history - was a once in a century chance at reform. He was Chief of Staff to Boris Johnson - until a lethal combination of the Civil Service he was trying to reform as one of the two things he insisted he be allowed to do if he were to take the job, the Whitehall bubble he loathed, the media he despised, and the stupid ambitions of Lady MacBoris whispering in Boris's ear (See also: Our Saint) decapitated him - and that chance - possibly dooming the UK for ever. There's a huge amount of really interesting and intelligent stuff there, by the by - for anyone, frankly: he's the singular most interesting political practitioner-cum-philosopher-cum-commentator alive, in my opinion, because he's been in the room. (And discovered, to his horror, that while he expected to meet some adults there, that, except for him and some vain pols and useless civil servants with him, the room was empty). His refreshingly honest responses to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Covid were gripping - it went on for hours and hours. I had other things to do but couldn't leave the room. I'm sharing this, as the English have been said to be the Greeks to the American Romans, by way of words of caution. One of the greatest things about America and Americans is your sunny optimism, confidence, enthusiasm, hope... It's really something. We are a small island archipelago, by contrast, subject to gloom, rain, pessimism, bleak houses, and wry comedy that often is a way of dealing with a kind of bitterness of spirit. I've personally thought about and explored the iron grip of the Civil Service and administration and bureaucracy on political life at great length over the decades since I was part of it. I have a hunch that it's essentially a mess because it's a kind of formalised, legalised, narcissism - the refusal to be embarrassed; delusions of competence; punishment of those who say The Emperor's New Clothes need ironing - a narcissism prevalent among those inclined to rule - &/or exacerbated by ruling - that may, accumulated over centuries, account for the horror show. A case can be made that it starts with the Tudors, who came down from the mountains like the Assads, and never got over the fact that they weren't all that. All of which is to say that, like most of us here, I hugely admire what you're attempting to do (but as you know, admire that you're a female pilot even more, my recently late father having been one himself, once upon a time) but don't want you to fall into the quagmire, or a 'slough of despond', while trying to negotiate a 'wilderness of mirrors' - all of which will be done in impeccable and artful English, with Downton Abbey upstairs accents, all obscuring the hard truth that the officials will ensure, under any and all circumstances, that no embarrassment accrues to their Masters. I also, of course, deeply admire the clarity and diligence with which you're trying to attack the, to many minds, unhealthy and genuinely curious opaque nature of the Invictus Games. Your terrier-like digging has clearly created movement at their end, and no doubt alerted them. You are now doing exactly what the UK system claims you should and could do using an FoI system under an act inspired by your Freedom of Information Act. And it only took [checks notes] 33 years of campaigning to become law. But who writes these acts? Who is responsible for their operation? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? America has levels of insight, seriousness, power in your chambers, legal independence, organisation and the wealth to run plays far in excess of anyone else, including the UK. We have only deviousness. But we have centuries of it under our belt. I of course wish you luck in your endeavours, and the mere act of trying is putting 'a dent in the universe', and offer this only by way of a weary cautionary tale. When things get rough, though, you can enjoy Yes, Minister & Yes, Prime Minister - but that was the past, which "is another country; they do things differently there." More modern, and sweary, to say the least, is the excellent The Thick of It. (The writers went on to do Veep). As ever, I wish you "blue skies and tailwinds". o7