The Spectator’s Notes | 6 December 2008

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected. All the other institutions of society — above all, Parliament — are ‘superstructure’, so much flim-flam to be insulted, ignored and, if the chance presents itself, kicked into ‘the dustbin of history’. Everything about the arrest of Damian Green shows the effects of this process. Thus the police, corrupted by years of political pressure, chose the brief moment when the House of Commons was prorogued to raid the offices of a Member of Parliament. Unless they are intensely stupid (a proposition not to be discounted), they cannot have imagined that their behaviour could ever have led to a successful prosecution, but they went ahead anyway, influenced perhaps by the fact that the official urging them on was Sir David Normington, who happens to be chairing the body trying to select the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Three of the senior policemen involved in the case want the job. Thus, too, the Speaker, Michael Martin, weakly anxious not to be on the wrong side of government, passed the buck for letting the police in to the Serjeant at Arms, herself a politically correct appointment designed to weaken the independence of parliamentary officers. The Commons ‘Commission’, the body invented to safeguard Parliament’s rights, was not consulted. And then the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman, seems to have tried, in a secret meeting, to tell the Speaker how to handle the issue in Parliament. Not so long ago, there was something called ‘the usual channels’, which was in essence, one person, the government chief whip’s private secretary, Murdo Maclean.