Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year.
A senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco
The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been avoided.
The three offending posts were made on the 19th and 20th April 2025. In one of the posts, Linehan wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
It would appear that Trans-activists seeking to use the authorities to wage their latest sally against those in the “gender-critical” or “gender-realist” movement chose to report Linehan to the police.
Ideally at this point the Met would have closed the case as a waste of time and resources. While the posts by Linehan – who is best known for writing the television series Father Ted – are hardly his finest comedic work, it is difficult to see what about them could have led the police to conclude that they were worthy of criminal investigation.
Today’s boys and girls in blue however decided otherwise.
The reporting officer will have conducted an initial review into the circumstances – in this case reading the posts and looking into Linehan’s background – and decided that it was indeed necessary to record the incident as a crime. The crime report would then be passed to a supervisor – probably a Sergeant and Inspector – who, having reviewed the material, allocated the case to an officer to investigate. The supervisor would at this point set out an “investigative plan” for the investigator to follow.
In a case such as this, with Linehan being someone who is at the very least a minor celebrity, the case would be escalated for review by a more senior officer – usually a Chief Inspector or Superintendent.
The exact level of seniority that this case reached is not yet clear – although the Met should certainly make that apparent so that we can see how far up the chain of command this episode managed to reach. What is important to note is that the case will undoubtedly have gone through the hands of an ever increasingly senior chain of officers before the decision was made to arrest Linehan.
Quite how the Met’s officers have been educated to reach the conclusion that an arrest was necessary in this case is a question that needs to be answered. Who are the “stakeholder” groups that have delivered training to officers on “Trans” issues? How many other similar – but non-celebrity – cases have there been? As US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “the light of day is the best disinfectant”.
Much has been made of the arresting officers being armed – the reality, as we have seen in other cases, is that airports are unique jurisdictions where the threat means that most officers do need to carry firearms. The more relevant issue is who approved the circulation of Linehan as being “wanted” on the Police National Computer, and what checks did the arresting officers make with the original investigators to ensure this was a case where an arrest was genuinely necessary? It seems unlikely that the threat posed by Linehan in that moment was so egregious that the arresting officers needed to be merely a slave to the machine and make an immediate arrest without checking with the originating officers first.
In a statement defending his force, the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has returned to his oft-used line – deployed repeatedly in relation to the policing of protests – of passing the buck to Parliament for the mess his officers have got themselves into. He says that, alongside the Met putting in place a new triage system to deal with these cases, new “law and guidance” is needed to “protect officers” from these situations. He also claims that officers were somehow obliged to pursue this case in the way that they did.
Sir Mark is wrong.
The trend by police chiefs to seek legislation to gold-plate the answer to almost every possible situation that officers may face is wrong-headed – how could all future scenarios possibly be accounted for? Under the existing system police chiefs and their officers retain wide discretion over how the deployment of police resources is prioritised – which cases are pursued and, ultimately, whether someone is arrested and how.
In this case specifically, a senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco before it escalated to the point of Linehan being arrested as he stepped onto the tarmac at Heathrow. It is, however, an unfortunate reality that policing is a large organisation where the leadership at every level is, to say the least, of “mixed ability”.
More generally, a policy to prevent such egregious excesses – something Rowley has now committed to implement – should already have been in place. We are now three years into Sir Mark’s tenure as Met Commissioner, two years into Chief Constable Gavin Stephens’ term as Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and four years into Sir Andy Marsh’s time as Chief Executive of the College of Policing. While some efforts have been made in recent years to ensure impartiality in policing, this has been far too little. The fingerprints of this group of “system leaders” (as they call themselves) are all over the existing policies and culture which led to this case – and plenty others besides.
This case represents another example – to add to those previously outlined by Policy Exchange – of a failure to ruthlessly prioritise crimes that really matter to the public over events that transpire online. Given police chiefs regularly pray in aid to the doctrine of “operational independence” from politicians, those same police chiefs should be held to account for their failings here.
One of the greatest challenges we face in policing is that many chief constables would have allowed this situation to arise in their own force. Much of the current crop are simply inadequate to the task of turning around policing. As one Chief Constable said to me recently, of his Chief Constable colleagues, “I wouldn’t have many of them as middle-ranking Superintendents in my force”.
British policing has become the principal example of all that has gone so wrong with the leadership of our nation’s permanent unelected state. It should also become the example of our democratically elected leaders doing what is required to fix the rot.
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