Cabinet Office crisis committee, three follow-up sessions, logged under a classification later downgraded following a Freedom of Information tribunal ruling nobody in government publicly welcomed. October, January, and May.

MINUTES — Session 1, 11pm, October (the first night)

Present: Home Secretary; Rear Admiral Pemberton; S. Foss (Cabinet Office); E. Okafor-Lindqvist (Directorate); others not named per standing protocol.

Item 1. Border Force confirms no vessel, no radar contact, no cutter sighting associated with the individual currently in custody at Eastbourne.

Item 2. Home Secretary raises whether "containment" (unspecified) remains an available option. Rear Admiral Pemberton advises that deployment of armed personnel against an unarmed, cooperative individual with no evidence of hostile intent would not survive judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny, or, in his words as minuted verbatim, "my own conscience, roughly in that order."

Item 3. Agreed: Directorate to take primacy. Public messaging limited to "assisting police with their enquiries" pending further assessment.

Action: E. Okafor-Lindqvist to travel to Eastbourne first thing to establish facts directly.

MINUTES — Session 4, January (following the Kent hotel incident)

Present: as before, plus representatives of two additional agencies not named in this extract.

Item 1. Committee notes public order incident at [redacted], described in official statements as "isolated" and "regrettably fuelled by online misinformation." Investigation ongoing into private security contractor presence at the scene; no findings to report at this time.

Item 2. Home Secretary notes declining public confidence in the "small boats" framing previously applied to this matter and requests guidance on revised messaging. Agreed: framing to be allowed to "recede naturally" rather than formally retracted, to avoid drawing further attention to its earlier use.

Item 3. Directorate reports one internal resignation and associated leak of operational material to a journalist. Legal team advises against pursuing the individual concerned, on the basis that doing so publicly would draw more attention to the material's contents than allowing it to be reported through ordinary channels.

Action: No further action recommended at this time.

MINUTES — Session 9, May (final session prior to committee's stand-down)

Present: as before; Home Secretary attending by video link from constituency.

Item 1. Committee notes broadcast of individual's final public statement, viewed by an estimated global audience the secretariat's own note describes as "not meaningfully calculable by any measure this committee has access to." Individual has since departed the country's jurisdiction by means not fully established, and is not believed to remain within it.

Item 2. Committee agrees no further coordinated response is required. Historical record of this committee's proceedings to be retained under existing classification "pending resolution of ongoing legal matters," a phrase the secretariat notes, for its own internal record only, "may in practice mean indefinitely."