it's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me

Well, what you should have done is get all your ducks in a row properly.

Don't remove PP status till you're ready to announce the decision (because someone may notice and trigger a mess). Don't announce it until you're ready to justify it. If doing that requires work to hide something that *really really* needs to be private, do all that work first. Peter's been a PP for more than a decade and he hasn't burned the project down yet, whoever he might have annoyed a bit. There was no rush to remove his privileges immediately.

Once you hadn't done that, the first response by FESCo to people highlighting the issues should have been the response Matthew and the Council eventually had to do instead: apologize for the errors, and announce that the revocation was being suspended while all the ducks were put in the correct order.

It's possible the decision is entirely justified. The problem is nobody outside of FESCo can judge that, and it doesn't seem like there was any legitimate reason to delay disclosure of the reasons for the decision beyond disclosure of the decision itself.