But it's simply not good enough to dismiss the dossier as acquiring a significance beyond what it deserved.
Kelly told Jones he thought that the dossier was a good idea, and he agreed with its over-all thrust.
It's almost as good as Tony Blair's terror dossier: 'I heard somebody who heard something which is a rumor of...'.
In the past twelve months, we've learned a good deal more about the Steele dossier, including that it was commissioned by the Washington-based intelligence firm Fusion GPS, which received funding from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign.
The inquiry's counsel, James Dingemans, said the flurry of activity "appears to betray an attitude that pressure is being brought to bear to dig out anything good by way of intelligence for the dossier".
As with a good grant application, your aim with the dossier is to give the reader a "living" document that is both informative and engaging.
But former minister David Mellor has played down what he called the "Dickens dossier", saying: "It was a good publicity thing for him but there wasn't much substance behind it".
The then-internationally-famous Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset even submitted a dossier as a gesture of good will.
Here the shadow chancellor's team, combined with the party's attack-and-rebuttal unit, has done a good job of responding to Tory attack dossiers, deconstructing their figures within hours and pushing back hard on false claims.
These materials created by the COE (dossiers and monographs) are a good starting point, within the necessary process of reflection regarding how the idea of Europe should be integrated today into the curriculum, and into school programmes.
