Plagues and Plebgate
The former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police - Sir Ian Blair - has written a 'plague on all your houses' opinion piece on the 'Plebgate' affair and, unsurprisingly perhaps, expresses his sympathies for the 'junior officers' who were given such a public mauling at the hands of the Home Affairs Select Committee.
But if you ask me, Sir Ian is way wide of the mark because these individuals behaved in the most bullying fashion - with their deliberate lies and misrepresentations about their meeting in October 2012 with the former Government chief whip, Andrew Mitchell MP.
Sir Ian's criticism of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) - because without their challenge to the whitewash of a report which concluded that these three officers had no disciplinary case to answer - these three men would have walked away Scot-free.
Yet as things have turned out, it now looks as if these three officers and those involved in the original incident at the gates of Downing Street - are finally to be held to account.
Lord Blair: Plebgate, the police and politics
No one emerges from the 'plebgate' row with their honour enhanced, former Met Commissioner Lord Blair writes
The Home Affairs Select Committee’s report, ‘Leadership and standards in the police: follow-up’, published on 3rd November, is certainly pretty hard hitting, as was its decision to recall two of the Police Federation’s witnesses two days later.
However, this is not a report into the original issue, the confrontation between Andrew Mitchell MP and a police officer at the entrance to Downing Street, which has joined the long and unsavoury group of gate-suffixed words which designate scandal, albeit with the partial excuse that it did at least involve a gate. This was an overture, not the main performance.
The report and the evidence sessions that preceded and now followed it were very bad for the reputation of the police. No one comes out of it with honour enhanced, not the various chief constables, not the Police Federation officials, not the IPCC, whose original decision not directly to investigate the matter has now been reversed, much too late.
And there is still no answer, more than a year later, to the main question as to who said what to whom at the gates outside the centre of the British Government.
But neither has it been a particularly elevating picture for the politicians involved. There was an uncomfortable element of grandstanding in the treatment by the Home Affairs Select Committee of junior officers unaccustomed to the daunting atmosphere of a parliamentary enquiry.
As the trio blinked in the camera lights, the question must have occurred to many as to whether this was the proper tribunal for an investigation into an actual police disciplinary case. These were not the CEOs of energy companies or multinationals and the Committee could have confined themselves to calling the relevant Chief Constables and IPCC Commissioners but chose not to.
By doing that, it is possible that some observers will question whether there is something unhealthy going on here: a display of outrage on behalf of a fellow MP that has not always been seen in relation to other legal scandals affecting ordinary citizens.
When this is accompanied by a chorus of political voices clearly assuming that Mr Mitchell was disgracefully ‘stitched-up’, when that has not yet been proven (although both he and to a much lesser extent all of us have a right to be extremely fed up that that is still unknown), then an impression of politicians being over-precipitate judges in their own cause could be the unsettling result. It may be time for a period of calm reflection.
