On BBC Sounds in full now, on podcast apps in two tranches of 5 as part of "Understand", and on air on Radio 4 every weekday from now until next Friday, a new series from Whistledown: "Derailed: The Story of HS2"

Tens of billions of pounds in budget overruns piling up, over a hundred miles of rail tracks being laid, dozens of viaducts and bridges under construction, dozens of ancient woodlands damaged, and one infamous bat tunnel later, we ask, what went wrong?

Featuring the engineers who dreamed it up, the politicians who tried to get it done, and the ordinary people who stood up against it, our new series, "Derailed: The Story of HS2", gets under the skin of the ambition and the fiasco that followed.

Kate Lamble has done an extraordinary bit of investigative journalism, unearthing the true - and very human - story behind Britain's most ambitious infrastructure project this century.

But we went back to the beginning - and found a far more complex and interesting story than we ever expected. HS2 is not a simple set of failures, or a classic tabloid scandal. It's a story that, as it has unfolded, has exposed deep national dysfunction.

When the UK looks out at the world - Japan, China, France, Spain - and their high speed rail networks, it feels like we're making something simple look very, very difficult.

2️⃣ Hot Money: "Agent of Chaos". Brilliantly produced story of how @financialtimes.com reporter @samgadjones.bsky.social investigated former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek - who turned out to be a Russian spy.

Exactly. The claim The Observer challenges/questions is that Moth was diagnosed definitively with typical CBD in 2013. The letter is a tentative diagnosis of unusual, "very mild" CBS in 2015. Which seems to be fairly consistent with the opinions of the experts cited by the Observer.

But the key claim previously made by Winn is that Moth was diagnosed with CBD in 2013, right before embarking on their famous walk. These letters do not evidence that claim.

This also doesn't line up time wise. The observer say the book claims a diagnosis of terminal CBD in 2013. This letter is from 2015.

The publication of the letters along with the statement has created a positive news cycle - a reader of this passage in the independent would likely come away with the impression that the letters effectively refute the Observer piece.

The plot thickens!

It does suggest Moth was receiving other tests as early as 2011. But it makes no reference to the idea that Moth has been previously diagnosed with CBS, or to the idea that this more optimistic prognosis of a mild version is in any way a downgrade of a previous diagnosis.

According to the Observer, the book claims a diagnosis of a terminal illness in 2013, the same year their house was reposessed. The earliest letter they have published is dated to June 2015, and explains that while Moth's condition "most closely resembles" CBS, it is clearly less severe.