The real lesson of this fiasco is that we need elected police chiefs

Perhaps now you’ll understand what we’ve been banging on about, we localists. For the better part of a decade, we’ve campaigned to place the police under elected sheriffs. Some of our chief constables, we contended, had cast off the cables that once attached them to public opinion. They were concentrating on speed cameras and hate crimes and community relations when the rest of us wanted them to concentrate on being unpleasant to scoundrels. The best way to align the police’s priorities with everyone else’s, we argued, was to place our constabularies under locally elected representatives.

You disagreed — you, Spectator readers in particular. Our ideas, you felt, were downright un-British. They might do for people in hot countries whose leaders wore sunglasses, but one of the glories of Britain’s constitution was the independence of its public servants. We heard the same objections over and over again, voiced by stiff-backed former army officers and stout-hearted Tory matrons. The last thing the country needed, you told us, was a politicised police force.

Well — with respect, Colonel, Madam — what the devil do you imagine we’ve got now? Even in hot countries where the leaders wear sunglasses, it would be considered disproportionate to send 20 anti-terrorist police against a middle-aged opposition politician, his wife and one of their teenage daughters.

What we’ve seen is a political arrest — a political arrest, for heaven’s sake. It may well be that, as ministers claim, they didn’t authorise the action — though their denials have been carefully phrased and lawyerly. But that isn’t really the point. The Home Office official in charge of the investigation, Sir David Normington, is also in charge of appointing the next Met Commissioner. Three of the senior officers involved in authorising the raid are in the running for that job. Even the most authoritarian states rarely involve direct operational commands to the police by interior ministers: senior policemen can usually be relied on to anticipate the regime’s wishes.