So after 2 weeks of faffing I now have Debian running on my laptop, took rather more mucking about than it should have done.  Just so I remember what I had to do here are some notes.

To get past UEFI secure boot I had to install Ubuntu, once that had successfully installed the grub boot loader, then I could install Debian non-free as the USB wifi dongle I was using was based on the Ralnk chipset, and that isn’t part of the standard package.

Once that was installed, you could add the distributions for back port and  contrib and non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list also add support for 32 bit architecture and install  firmware-iwlwifi

After all of that it seems to be working, which is a very good thing.