The Green affair

It seems that the government may hold some sort of enquiry, and the acting Commissioner of the Met. has already set up a quick review of the situation. We are told that many senior policemen are very concerned about elements of the arrest and detention.

It is difficult at the moment to know much about why things happened as they did. Perhaps, but don't count on it as every sort of politics is involved here, we shall know more in a week or two, after the police review.

In the meantime there are so many questions which are not being answered:

1) Why were the counter-terrorism police involved, especially at a time of heightened alert after the terrorism in India? Nobody, as afar as I know, has claimed that any offences would have national security aspects.

2) Why was Damien Green arrested under a catch-all little known 18th century law? Was the intention to frighten would-be leakers and recipients? Who decided on this charge, and why?

3) Why was it timed to take place in a parliamentary recess, when important "players" might have been absent from their offices? Was this to avoid parliamentary debate and protest?

4) Why did the police inform members of the opposition, Messrs. Johnson and Cameron, before the raid took place, but not vital members of the government, and especially Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith?

5) Why did the senior Civil Servant who called in the police, as the result of leaks, not know, and if he did why did he not inform his boss Jacqui Smith? Did the police not keep him informed on such an important constitutional issue?

6) Why did the police tell that Sergeant at Arms that the raid on the Westminster office had been sanctioned by the Director of Public Prosecutions, when it had not? She contacted her line boss, who was satisfied by the mention of the DPP, but was unable to get a message of very great importance to the Speaker.

7) Why, on a Friday, when admittedly most MPs had left, could no-one contact the Speaker, the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary? Are there no emergency arrangments for contact?

8) With exception of Harriet Harman, who wrings her hands and talks about sovereignty while insisting on the independence of the police, no other leading member of the government has expressed any concern at what happened. There seems to be a set of back-protecting, "Not me, guv. I couldn't be reached. I was absent." This will doubtless be the Speaker's get-out tomorrow in his statement prepared by the gang meeting today to make sure they all tell the same story.
So far Brown and Smith have said little more than the careful and non-committal, "I was not aware of the actual raid until afterwards."

These are important issues, and some must be resolved before a new Police Commisioner is appointed. For the rest it might suit the government to try to bury the whole issue. If they are culpable, it looks possible that they have shot themselves in the foot. It may be that bad decisions were made by a number of persons or groups which they now regret.

It ill becomes Zanu Labour to try to use the force of the law to prevent the very practice in which they indulged so profitably when in opposition, a practice which many people feel should not be punished if it reveals government incompetence or deceit, rather than security matters.