What are the police for? Or rather, who are the police for?

The road was cordoned off by Horse Guards parade on Friday afternoon, because of some ‘function’ on the pavement beside the Treasury building: squat little marquee, squat little men drinking warm champagne and 30 odd police officers standing around in the street with truncheons.

As I herded with the crowd along the pedestrian detour I saw a blind man in a smart suit with a guide dog, fumbling in a panicky way at the police barrier. He worked in the Treasury opposite, he said, and though there’d been a gap in the fence 5 mins ago, which he’d popped through to walk his dog, it now seemed to have vanished.

I couldn’t see the gap either, so I called out to a nearby policewoman, and this is how the conversation went:

Policewoman: “Oh, I just closed that gap.”