Although I don’t agree with her contention that Boris’s involvement in the sacking of Ian Blair was some sort of high water mark in the politicisation of policing, Jackie Ashley does write forcefully on Jacqui Smith this morning. Ashley idenitifies the key question hovering above the Home Secretary right now: is she lying about what she knew or just plain incompetent? Here’s the key passage:
“You can’t separate politics from policing, and you never have been able to: political judgments are so often behind what the police do. In this case, it is simply risible to push off the responsibility for the invasion of Green’s home and offices by anti-terrorist officers on to the police and nameless “officials”. If the home secretary did not know, she should have done. She knew there was a leak inquiry, that it was becoming a criminal investigation, and that one of her own officials had been arrested. Are we really to believe that she did not know he had been a Tory activist and had not wondered whether Tory MPs might be drawn in? Are we to accept that she looked the other way, and now feels proud of this strange incuriosity?
Her highest title is not, actually, home secretary. She is first a member of parliament. Her first duty is to the parliamentary democracy that sustains us all, and that means protecting the rights of elected members to carry out their democratic job.
Smith should have found out what was being contemplated by the police and then intervened to stop it. Far from being “Stalinist”, that would have been the proportionate, liberal and sensible thing. Having failed to do that, she should then have apologised to Green.”I can’t imagine Smith emerging from all this without her political credibility in tatters.
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