Under questioning, the Plebgate police stick to their lines

All the best apologies these days are celebrated with a nice autotune session on YouTube. But this afternoon’s apologies, if you can call them that, from Detective Sergeant Stuart Hinton and Sergeant Chris Jones didn’t quite deserve that sort of treatment. In fact, the two men, appearing separately, had managed to tune their own evidence rather well.

They both said that they ‘cannot apologise for something I haven’t done’, when asked to apologise for lying about the meeting. Hinton said he regretted ‘any distress caused’ to Mr Mitchell and his family. Keith Vaz pressed Jones on whether he wanted to apologise to Mitchell and his family, saying ‘you don’t believe you had anything to do with any distress that was caused?’ There was a long, awkward pause, and then Jones said: ‘I come back to the point that I can’t apologise for something I haven’t done.’