And Damian Green is suspected of what, exactly? I just spoke to Steve Moxon, who was a whistleblower in the Home Office and sacked for leaking stories. As you can imagine, he knows more about the legalities of all this than most. When he was rumbled, he said, he was safe under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. It protects whistleblowers who are doing it for the public interest (as opposed to for money, etc). Moxon lost his job, but kept his liberty – and wrote a rather good book about it all, The Great Immigration Scandal. Moxon told me he couldn’t begin to work out what was going on in this case.
I believe Gordon Brown when he says he had no prior knowledge of Green’s arrest, and also suspect he would have stopped the arrest if he could. He will be under no illusions as to how bad this will look, and that there will be those who’ll think (wrongly) that he somehow encouraged Green’s arrest. In fact, if you were a police chief who really hated Brown an wanted to make him look as Stalinist as possible, you couldn’t do better than send anti-terror police round to search the Commons office of an Opposition MP and then arrest him. As things stand, Green will come out of this with a martyr’s halo.
The reason the public send MPs to parliament is to scrutinise the government, using any means at their disposal. So either there is a lot more to this than we know, or the police have made a huge blunder which strikes deep at existing concerns about civil liberties in Britain.
Journalists like myself are paid, in part, to get hold of leaks if we can, and run them if their publication is in the public interest. Until four hours ago, I had no idea I lived in a country where such endeavour was illegal.
PS The CPS guidelines on Conduct in Public Office – which Green has been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to contravene – can be found here
PPS Boris Johnson sums up the incredulity perfectly in this statement: “The Mayor finds it hard to believe that on the day when terrorist have gone on the rampage in India that anti terror police in Britain have apparently targeted an elected representative of Parliament for no greater crime than allegedly receiving leaked documents”.
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