partitioning – Dual booting on Lenovo X270 with Windows 11 which has taken 3 primary partitions but is missing the efi boot partition

I am trying to set up dual booting on Lenovo X270 with Windows 11. I previously have installed 22.04 on this X270 machine.I have 22.04 on the USB stick. This F12s perfectly on the target machine.

I go to install, and it gets as Far as selecting the partition, then I get the error message that an efi boot partition is required. True.

W11 has taken 3 primary partitions but is missing the efi .boot partition.
The disk has four primary partitions- A small W11 partition, the big W11 partition that I have resized to give space to create the Ubuntu partition, and the W11 recovery partition.
Youtubers say dont mess with 3 W11 partitions- I need a fourth partition for efi.boot partition and that must be a primary – and in addition I need a partition for Ubuntu which could be a logical placed in an extended partition. 3+1 +1more exceeds 4.

The version of W11 supplied to Lenovo appears to hide the crucial files in the small systems partition in hard code so is not recognised by Ubuntu.

Question: what is the way forward?