McChatter: Iain WcWhirter
PC Plod has been called in to investigate the leaking of Home Office documents. A senior Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested and held for nine hours for allegedly breaching official secrecy. Well, it makes a change from the government's normal practice of breaching secrecy by losing sensitive information on laptops, mislaying CDs, and documents being left on trains - you name it, this government has lost it. Surely the police should be quizzing the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, about her previous.
For the government to be sanctioning a police crackdown on leaks betrays hypocrisy staggering even by their standards. Haven't they noticed that Peter Mandelson is sitting round the Cabinet table? The prince of darkness used to hand information about government activities to friendly hacks in the parliamentary lobby on a daily basis. Indeed, the lobby system is an institutionalised breach of official secrecy. The only difference is that it favourable to the government and damaging to its (or Mandelson's) enemies.
The prime minister, who has refused to condemn the police action, has form himself. When he was an opposition MP, Gordon Brown was famous for handing sensitive and embarrassing information - often given to him by civil servants - to the press for party political gain. If Damian Green is guilty of an offence, they will have to lock up the PM and throw away the key.
Then there's the chancellor, Alistair Darling. Was he unaware of leaks to the press about the content of last week's emergency pre-Budget report? It is standard news management for ministerial aides to leak details about future measures to minimise their impact on the day.
Green was arrested on suspicion of "abetting or procuring misconduct in public office" which sounds like a throwback to the "back to basics" days. But this is a serious matter.
What apparently incensed Smith's permanent civil servant, Sir David Normington, was that Green was allegedly the source for press stories about the Home Office clearing illegal immigrants to work in government departments and about research indicating that higher unemployment could lead to higher crime. Well, politics aside, these seem to me to be matters of legitimate public interest.
No-one believes for a second that the government didn't know about this latest abuse of counter-terrorism statutes, but even ministers didn't know that they should have condemned the police for a breach of parliamentary privilege.
The police have no right telling MPs what information they should handle in the public. Parliament is a court, as viewers of The Devil's Whore know. The police should be called to the bar and locked up.
