Our police acted like pound store Stasi during the Damian Green porn scandal
THERESA MAY has sacked her closest ally, Damian Green, for what the PM calls behaviour that falls short of what is expected of a Cabinet minister.
But beyond this sleazy, unseemly episode about whether or not a 61-year-old married man gawped at porn during his tea break, there is a far more important story.
Namely — has the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police in this affair fallen short of what we expect of cops in a free, civilised democracy?
Green initially insisted that he knew nothing about the discovery of “improper material” made in a police raid on his Commons office in 2008.
This turned out to be, he now concedes, “inaccurate and misleading” because police lawyers had talked to his own lawyers.
The word “porn” will follow Green around to his dying day.
But lest we forget, his downfall began last month with a Commons inquiry into the allegations that he had touched the knee of Tory activist Kate Maltby and sent her a crass text about her wearing a corset.
All this was denied by Green, and none of it has been proven, but Green has since apologised to the woman for any conduct towards her that made her uncomfortable.
And that would have probably been the end of it if two retired Scotland Yard detectives had not crawled out of the woodwork with the incendiary allegation that “thousands” of pornographic images had been found on Green’s computer when they raided his Westminster office nine years ago.
The release of this highly sensitive, dated information was, at the very least, a grotesque breach of confidentiality.
At its worst, it looks suspiciously like the spiteful, vengeful act of former cops bringing down an elected politician they long despised.
And the two ex-Scotland Yard detectives behind the porn allegations, Bob Quick and Neil Lewis, give every indication of heartily despising Green.
Bob Quick is the former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner who ordered the raid on Green’s office and home in 2008, when the MP was shadow immigration minister. Neil Lewis is the former cop who analysed the computer images.
The raid on Green’s office and home, conducted by 30 counter- terrorism officers, was seeking evidence of leaked information from the then Labour government.
Police were not looking for pornography but evidence that Green’s office was receiving possibly stolen, top-secret information that would have been embarrassing to then Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and perhaps endangered national security.
Green was told he could face life imprisonment if convicted.
No charges were brought against him and Quick later lost his job after being photographed carrying sensitive papers into 10 Downing Street. Quick blamed the political establishment for his demise.
A feud was born.
And so Green’s downfall does not look even remotely like a triumph for truth and justice.
It looks like a victory for vindictive former cops claiming a scalp they have craved for almost ten years.
Green’s departure raises some important questions but none of them are about the behaviour of Theresa May’s oldest ally.
Do we really want cops setting up politicians as if we live in some Third World police state?
Why did retired cops feel free to give interviews about Green as though he was a convicted sex offender?
How the hell can they get away with it?
Green continues to assert that he did not download or view pornography found on his Westminster computer.
And yes, it is a sad moment when the First Secretary of State, effectively Mrs May’s deputy, is forced out of office for lying.
But if that is sad then the role of the police in this unhappy affair is truly tragic.
In the oldest democracy in the world, the police have acted like a pound-store Stasi.
And the Metropolitan Police should be far better than that.
Hollywood scandal
MERYL STREEP, who once described Harvey Weinstein as “god”, is accused of hypocrisy by Rose McGowan, one of the producer’s fiercest critics.
McGowan alleges Streep of “happily working with the Pig Monster” while the actress says of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct: “I didn’t know.”
Perhaps it is true. Weinstein stands accused of abusing many women over many years.
Yet perhaps Meryl Streep didn’t know.
But Weinstein’s former friends seem to want it both ways – to have mightily benefited from their association with the producer for decades while remaining totally untainted by it now.
Respect the US if not Trump
THERE are bonds between this country and the US that will endure long after President Trump’s hairpiece has turned to dust.
We are joined by language, culture and shared history.
One brash, crass president does not change any of that.
So of course Trump should come over in February to open the shiny new £750million American embassy on the banks of the Thames and discuss a post-Brexit trade deal.
It is clearly in our national interest.
And how perverse that there will be furious protests objecting to a democratically elected president coming here when nobody gave a toss when communist hardmen, Middle Eastern royalty and African despots were swanning down the red carpet.
Trump has already paid visits to Paris and Brussels.
Why shouldn’t he be allowed to drop in on America’s oldest ally?
- AFTER hitting the gym hard when her marriage broke up, Davina McCall now has abdominal muscles that must have Cristiano Ronaldo’s six-pack twitching with envy. Can you have too much gym? Possibly, but Davina doesn’t simply look ripped. She also looks fit, healthy and happy.
Which looks like exactly the right amount of gym.
Ace Amir gives us all hope
AMIR KHAN, a devout Muslim, put up a Christmas tree to delight his three-year-old daughter Lamaisah and received death threats for “betraying his religion”.
But by putting up that Christmas tree for his little girl, Amir gives us hope for the future in a country where we are all free to believe what we want to believe but where we share an affection and joy for traditions that have existed for generations.
The alternative is that we all rot in our own little ghetto, spitting poison at anyone who believes something different.
And if that is the country we build – God help us.
Jerry Christmas?
JEREMY CORBYN once told us he would be PM by Christmas.
But he never said which Christmas.
Now he says he will probably be PM within the year.
Does the arrogant old duffer have a year in mind?
Spanish have lot to learn
SPANISH PM Mariano Rajoy is threatening to veto trade talks over Brexit as a ploy to grab back Spanish sovereignty of Gibraltar after 304 years of British rule.
Good luck with that, senor.
The 30,000 residents of Gibraltar are proud to be British citizens.
And as they watched Spanish cops brutally smash up the Catalan referendum and toss elected Catalan politicians in jail, the Spanish government gave them no reason to change their minds.
Spain only became a democracy after Europe’s last surviving fascist leader, General Franco, popped his jackboots in 1975.
You sense that they are still getting the hang of it.
- IN recent years, 3.5million Brits have decided to not pay the BBC’s £147-a-year licence fee.
In the world of Netflix, Amazon Prime, box set-bingeing and pay-per-view, the BBC looks increasingly irrelevant. It was no reflection on Anthony Joshua that he came fourth in BBC Sports Personality of the Year. It just showed how out of touch the Beeb has become.
British boxing is enjoying a new golden age.
But increasingly, the BBC looks like it belongs to an age that has gone.
We must tame net wild west
GOOGLE, Twitter and Facebook are never going to police themselves.
Somebody is going to have to do it for them.
This week furious MPs on the Home Affairs committee confronted mealy-mouthed representatives from the tech giants about the filth they routinely allow on their platforms.
But we have been here before.
Last spring MPs grilled the same companies about the trash they peddle.
Nothing changed.
You might say that things have got worse because between then and now, Salman Abedi watched a video on Google-owned YouTube and used it to get instructions to make the bomb he detonated at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
It is time to stop politely asking Google, Twitter and Facebook to clean up their acts.
Advertisers must walk away from the amoral internet platforms.
Consumers such as you and I need to wake up to the fact that it is not compulsory to use these sites.
And governments have to start hitting the internet firms in the only place they care about – the bottom line.
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When they peddle filth, fine them until they start paying attention.
Until that happens, Google, Twitter and Facebook will be a digital Dodge City where anything goes.
And child abuse and terrorist propaganda will simply be part of the scenery.