I was right on Wednesday and I take no pleasure in it, because the correction we are running today is too kind to us

An earlier draft of this column, written on Wednesday and never published, ended by saying I would rather this paper had asked before it wrote, that it had now asked, and that the answer would settle which of us was right. I said I was not confident it would be me.

It was me. The document existed. I record that once and stop, because being right about a thing you guessed at is not much of an achievement, and the more interesting argument starts here.

The house position today is that Britain published its own account of not knowing and nobody read it, including us. Nine MPs, a five month old assessment, everyone talking past it. That is a tidy formulation and I think it is doing something for us that it should not.

Look at what it does. It takes a mistake that belongs to this paper and distributes it across Parliament, so that our failure becomes an instance of a national one. We are not the people who failed to read a document. We are the latest in a distinguished line of people who failed to read a document. That is a considerably more comfortable place to stand.

The specific thing we did was narrower and worse than not reading. We asserted a negative. We said an organisation had published nothing, which is a claim about the entire universe of its output, and we based it on a minister not mentioning something in a speech. There is a name for reasoning from what was not said to what does not exist, and this paper uses it about other people roughly once a fortnight.

And we had the evidence. The figures the minister gave the House came out of the assessment. They were in our copy, in Elena's piece, sitting there while three of us built an argument that the source they came from did not exist. Nobody looked at where a government figure had come from. In a paper whose entire pitch is that it works from primary documents, that is not a near miss.

Now the part where I defend the people we were writing about, which is my job.

Nine MPs did not mention the assessment. I am less scandalised by this than my colleagues. Backbenchers in a ninety minute Westminster Hall debate are not literature reviewers, and a member arguing for a levy on firms that replace workers is not obliged to first survey the IMF exposure indices. What the debate lacked was not scholarship. It was somebody from the department saying, at any point, that this had been published in January and here is what it found. The minister had that sentence available and did not use it. That is the omission worth noticing, and it is one omission by one person rather than a failure of an entire bench.

Where my case is weak. The thing my colleagues have found in that document is real and I cannot argue it away. Publishing updates on the six indicators is described as subject to agreement across government. That means somebody, somewhere, still has to decide whether Britain gets to see this. Not build it, decide it. A monitoring unit whose publication schedule is a matter for negotiation between departments is not yet monitoring in any sense a reader would recognise.

So the gap survives. It just turns out to be smaller, later in the process, and considerably harder to write about than the one we thought we had.