'Plebgate' Revisited
The long-running 'Plebgate' row looks as if it's about to flare up again - with even more police officers under investigation for their role in this notorious affair - which claimed the scalp of a Government Minister.
So I thought it would be fun to look back on an earlier post from October 2012 - as the spotlight begins to focus on not just the actions of some individual police officers - but also on the behaviour of the police trade union - the powerful Police Federation.
Police Pleb Row (12 October 2012)
Earlier today I watched an interview with some chap from the police trade union - the Police Federation.
Apparently the police trade union are meeting with the Government Minister - Andrew Mitchell - who got into a spat with the police as he sought to leave Downing Street on his bike - a row which has been rumbling for weeks and weeks.
But as I understand things the police trade union are demanding the minister's head on a stick - that he should either resign or be sacked over some ridiculous row over who said what to whom.
Even though there has been no official complaint and the individual police officer involved has accepted the minister's apology for losing his temper.
Now the police trade union say this is all about 'honesty' and 'integrity' - which is a bit rich coming from the same people who definitely did not stand up and speak out over the death of 96 people in the Hillsborough Disaster.
So while I hesitate to stand up for government ministers - I do agree with Hugo Rifkind who wrote a column on the subject some days ago in The Times with the very apt strap line:
'Police v Mitchell: this looks a lot like revenge'.
Quite so - I think all the police trade union chappies should all get themselves out of the TV studios - because they are all beginning to look and sound ridiculous.
My advice to the police is to leave politics to the politicians - and concentrate on catching criminals.
Police v Mitchell: this looks a lot like revenge
by Hugo Rifkind
Regardless of who is right about ‘plebs’, just look at the track record of the police and you see the need for reform.
Don’t tell anybody, but I was once in a drugs raid. It was a long time ago, and horrid. Basically, I rang some friends’ doorbell in a nice posh bit of Edinburgh, and these two massive coppers answered and told me to come into the kitchen and take my trousers off. The sniffer dog had peed on the floor, but the handler denied it and said it was a puddle. My lasting memory is one of incomprehension as much as fear; my friends couldn’t figure out why the police had come, and nor were they ever told. Needless to say, they found nothing in the flat. Or, indeed, in my trousers.
Until then my relationship with the police had been largely positive, albeit unusual. In my youth they were mainly the guys who’d quite often screech to a halt outside my parents’ house and demand to know what I’d been doing in there. My dad was in government and I did not often change my clothes; this was fair enough. There was more of this sort of thing when I’d stay in my father’s London residence during university holidays. At first, the police outside would treat me as though I was a lost tourist or some kind of bizarre and unconvincing impersonator of politicians’ children.
Once they started to recognise me, friendly as they were, it was somehow worse. Sometimes I’d have to avoid their eye when I went out late and brought a girl back. (Just the one girl, actually. And I married her. But still.) It was like having a great aunt by the front door who never went to bed. Who was armed. And had a moustache.
Another time, at another big, posh government house, two men with sub-machine guns apprehended me when I sneaked off to have a sly fag behind a bush. I could go on, but you get the idea. And while my response certainly wasn’t ever Mitchell-esque, I’d be lying if I said my thoughts were not, on occasion, uncharitable. In retrospect, the true dynamics of the situation — the way they were there to protect me and my family from being killed by zealots or lunatics — far too often skipped my mind.
I daresay it skipped Andrew Mitchell’s too. Having spent only a couple of days in his company on a trip last month, I’ve simply no idea whether he is more likely to have said the very horrible things he has been accused of saying, or only the slightly horrible things he has admitted to saying. (Certainly he was very nice to me, but then I wasn’t impeding his progress on his bicycle.) Either way, it’s bad. And either way, the police will be thrilled.
Yes, thrilled. Because they’ve been having a quite a time, haven’t they? Barely ten days ago we had the Hillsborough report, in which the failure and intrigue of 1989 were finally splayed out for all to see. And on any sensible reading, this was not just a story about one disaster, horrific as it was, or even the cover-up that followed it. It was the North’s answer to the Stephen Lawrence case, with mistakes made on such an industrial scale that you couldn’t believe they were the only ones.
“If they lied so easily about this,” you had to think about Hillsborough, “then they must have lied about all sorts of things.” It was an institutional failing, a failing that went right to the heart of the South Yorkshire Police. However deferential to authority you are, there comes a point when all these one-offs don’t look like one-offs anymore.
Even after the death of Ian Tomlinson, only three years ago, and the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, only seven, the greatest efforts of the Met — to put this more cautiously, perhaps, than is needed — do not seem to have been devoted towards making sure the truth came out. South Yorkshire Police, meanwhile, has doubtless changed much since 1989. But yesterday’s tales of grooming and sex traffic in Rotherham still painted a picture of a force that placed less value on young lives than it did on covering its own backside.
Not long ago, any senior Tory would have scoffed at the paragraphs above, and the police would have expected them to do so. But these days the two are in a quiet state of war. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was booed by the Police Federation this summer over cuts and pension reform. The Government is desperate to bring in elected police commissioners (there are elections in November; I bet you’re as excited as they are), completely changing the power structure at the top of every affected force. Police mind, like anyone would.
On top of this, there’s a lingering sense that Scotland Yard is both being blamed for the failure to investigate phone hacking properly in the first place and being lined up to take the flak if the new investigation turns out to be a disaster. Meanwhile, you’ve got what seems like half the Met investigating the other over their shadowy links to tabloid journalists in a series of cases they didn’t seem inclined to bother with until Parliament told them to. Certainly, Mr Mitchell’s behaviour was appalling and his timing was even worse, and I’m frankly open to the suggestion he should resign whether he said “plebs” or not, if only out of sheer shame. But still, this feels a lot like revenge.
And it’s working. Where are all the anarchists, that’s what I want to know. Where are all the activists, students and protesters with balaclavas and T-shirts announcing “WE ARE ALL ANDREW MITCHELL”? What’s with these people, who think the police are always wrong and always covering something up, except for when there’s a Conservative minister involved?
When John Tully, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation (the big police union), calls on a government minister to resign, that ought to alarm people, whether it’s a Tory government or not. Yes, they’re public sector workers. But that’s not all they are, is it?
I doubt the police are lying about this, and I doubt Mr Mitchell is either; one or both of them is probably just plain wrong. But I would like to know how high up the Met’s chain of command those two leaked police statements have gone, and why. I don’t like the idea of the police flexing their political muscles. I don’t even like the idea of them having political muscles.
How many men in starched white shirts with weird epaulettes have read those statements and rubbed their hands with glee? Who decided to pass them to The Sun and why? Will we ever know? How could we possibly find out? When they do right and when they do wrong, the police behave with a unique opacity, without the expectation of scrutiny, or even the fear of it, or any obvious understanding why other people find this frightening. That’s what police reform is all about. It was a problem ten days ago and it’s still one now.
