Politicians, as it has become fashionable to say, are not above the law. Who�d have thought? But then, police and policing are not, or not yet, beyond legal principle.
Politicians, as it has become fashionable to say, are not above the law. Who'd have thought? But then, police and policing are not, or not yet, beyond legal principle. The operational independence that so consoles Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is not blanket immunity. Democratic control and police independence must be balanced and reconciled. That's the theory.
Constitutional law is a funny, even hilarious, old beast. It is not often codified in these islands. The dignity of parliament is, meanwhile, another amusing notion, especially if you have ever watched Westminster in action. Parliamentary privilege may only cover the proceedings of the House and correspondence between constituents and their MPs, or it may be something broader. The lawyers can debate that until the invoices come home.
What was supposed to be clear, however, was that agents of the state could not raid an MP's office and home, detain him for nine hours, ransack his personal effects and menace (she says) his wife without an urgent reason. The fact that Damian Green is a Tory frontbencher is not, sadly, an excuse. Embarrassment to the government does not, or not yet, trump a public interest defence. And the deployment of anti-terrorist officers serves only to make a farce sinister.
Here's the man-in-the-street question, or one such: doesn't the Met's specialist operations branch, and its commissioner, Bob Quick, have a few other files in the in-tray? Its job is national security, but no one, least of all the Home Office, is suggesting that the Official Secrets Act or terrorism, our modern catch-all, had any bearing on the leaks received by Mr Green.
The leaker, a 26-year-old named Christopher Galley, with a fondness for the Tory party, is one of two things: a bad, silly lad, or a civil servant with a well-developed conscience. It does not, in truth, matter much. Governments leak; opposition politicians are nourished by leaks; and in a country obsessed still with secrecy, the ritual should not be discouraged.
Evidence of actual espionage might have made Mr Green seem less than a hero. Market sensitive information - but who leaked the pre-Budget report? - counts as important. Anything else? This is a government fighting, after all, to prevent the minutes of the Cabinet's Iraq war discussions from becoming public property. On what grounds? That ministers might in future have to watch what they say? Or that ministers might have to say what they mean, mean what they say, and stand by it?
Mr Green was just thumped by a big clunking fist, at my guess, but Gordon Brown denies all knowledge. Ms Smith turns out to have been better informed, thanks to Sir Paul Stephenson, acting head of the Met, than she hitherto allowed. Michael Martin, Speaker of the House, appears to have assisted police inquiries without much argument (though a statement today may suggest otherwise).
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions, has been roped in, the transport police are investigating other police, and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has been making political capital.
Policing, politics, the "war on terror" and state secrecy (if not security) have melted and fused into a messy puddle. Why? Just because the Tories got a few leaks on immigration policies and numbers?
That's not how these things are done, not in Britain. Today's Queen's Speech will pass off without "disruption" for the same deferential reasons. Speaker Martin, long a Tory target, will not quit because he, like the parliamentary system, stands on dignity. But a police raid on the Palace of Westminster? DNA samples demanded and obtained? And the charge that a young Civil Service junior was "groomed", meaning suborned?
The government, with "operational independence" of its own, has just torn up another set of unwritten rules. Leak inquiries snare fall-guys, not front-bench spokesmen. MPs have their phones tapped and their associations investigated: that much is old hat. But the plods do not, by this protocol, come through the door. Even if ministers wanted payback, as it is called, for the cash-for-honours investigation (the one they blocked), Mr Green's case is beyond excessive.
The anti-terror apparatus is fast becoming the thing we cynics always feared: this is state security.
Its effect, if not its intent - but indulge me - is intimidation. It is of a piece with ID cards and those fantastical schemes for vast databases, wholesale monitoring of communications, biometric spying, and the rest. The institutionalised officiousness of the Home Office has been striving after these for decades. Once it was the desire for a national police force. Now the bureaucracy lusts, as all bureaucracies lust, for information. And it hates losing the stuff.
It mislays astounding amounts, predictably. That might be the comic sub-text to the travails in which Mr Green has revelled. "Up to" 20 leaks from Mr Galley? Compared with all those discs forgotten, all those memory sticks mislaid, and the dozens of laptops "stolen" from government? If you truly wish to worry about a security state, worry about this: they're not very good at the game.
But I know how hairs are split. "How can it be a police state," some may inquire, "if you are free to call it a police state?" Wrong. In a debauched democracy, everything is for the best in the best of all possible democracies. Everyone is always free, and only the paranoid could disagree. That diagnosis will be on your biometric card soon enough. Just to be on the safe side.
Mr Green could have been warned off. Mr Galley could have been sent to the gulag of work and pensions and spared the boys from Bindmans another civil libertarian speech. It was decided instead that a senior Tory should be clobbered. This was no mere "police matter". In the language of other societies, the government set the cops on an opposition politician. If Ms Smith truly knew nothing about any of it she should shred her files, tender her resignation, and go home. But stay off the phone.
I am not the most staunch defender of that big private club by the Thames. The British Parliament has failed too often to fulfil its elementary functions - Iraq, yet again - to justify the self-serving romance. But when the tiny demilitarised zone between executive and legislature is crossed, we have a significant problem.
Legal arguments over the Iraq Cabinet minutes and Mr Green's ferreting seem to have coincided. Freelance journalists are being strip-searched, currently, because the government has got itself caught bugging its own MPs. The Home Office is implacable in its demented pursuit of information-harvesting. And we, some of us, are paranoid if we think aloud about any of this?
Ian Johnston, Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, will no doubt put all our minds to rest, or to decent somnolence, soon enough. No blame will attach to Ms Smith, or to Downing Street, or to any ambition on the part of anyone who wishes to become the next chief cop at the Met.
Meanwhile, the absurdity we call a constitution will depend still on a few seventeenth-century notions and quaint practices. The Queen will deliver her speech today, for herself and her government, and the Speaker of the Commons will burble something solemn. Ancient, dignified, and wholly inadequate.
