Bodyguards always draw attention to the people they’re supposed to be protecting

Reading the Observer on Sunday (don’t judge me, it’s my job) I came across the story of a Special Branch policeman called Officer A, who lived undercover with extremist left-wing groups for years in the mid-1990s. As a member of the Special Demonstration Squad, and distant from his wife and child, he grew a ponytail, befriended and slept with Trotskyists, lived a double life, and kept having to punch his fellow policemen to preserve it.

‘Blimey,’ I thought to myself. ‘That’s got to be one of the least pleasant jobs in policing.’ But then, in the Mail on Sunday (like I said, it’s my job), I read about the policemen who, 24-7, perform bodyguard duties to Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. ‘Then again,’ I thought. ‘Maybe not.’

Both of these stories make me think of London traffic and bollards. You know the stuff they’ve done at Oxford Circus and in Kensington High Street, where they figured out that getting rid of supposed safety features — islands, signs, railings and suchlike — actually makes people drive better and keeps pedestrians safer? Warms my libertarian heart, that. It might not sound like it’s got much to do with Special Branch, I’ll concede, but bear with me, because I really think it does.

Let’s start with the SDS chap. He infiltrated his first group by punching out a suspected racist in a student canteen, and then joining in on — or arguably, initiating — a mid-demonstration attack on some uniformed policemen. Thereafter his main role was to report on clashes that his and other left-wing groups, which had often also been infiltrated by the SDS, had with right-wing groups, which had been too.