Dominic Lawson

AFEW years ago, the Home Office minister then responsible for the police, Nick Herbert, backed plans to force the boys in blue to have annual fitness tests.

They were furious, even though — or perhaps, because — it followed a report that more than half the male officers in the Metropolitan Police were overweight.

Nick Herbert is no longer a minister but told a friend of mine that, ever since, he has been ultra-careful about not breaking the 30mph limit when driving his car in London because ‘they’d like to get me’.

My reaction on hearing this was: would the police really use their privileged position to take personal revenge on a politician? Well, it seems Herbert was right to be concerned.

Yesterday, we learned that a former assistant commissioner at the Met, Bob Quick, had confirmed to The Sunday Times an allegation that his officers had almost a decade ago found ‘extreme’ pornographic material on computers in the parliamentary office of the then shadow Home Office minister Damian Green — the man now second only to Theresa May in the hierarchy of government.

Apparently, Quick is now willing to come forward and give evidence to a Cabinet Office inquiry. At least if that happened we might learn whether the alleged material was on Green’s own computer or that of a member of his office.

Why on earth should Quick have chosen to make such a damaging claim against the First Secretary of State? And why now? The second question is easily answered. Last week, a Cabinet Office inquiry was set up to investigate claims by Kate Maltby, a journalist three decades younger than Green, that two years ago he made a sexual advance to her.

Grievance

Quick is reinforcing the idea that Theresa May’s right-hand man is sexually dodgy, thus backing up Ms Maltby’s claim (which Green strenuously repudiates). Of course, if the former policeman had the remotest sense of propriety himself, he would simply have given his information (true or not) directly to the Cabinet Office and left it at that.

But that is not all he has done — and this, in fact, addresses my first question. Quick seems prepared to damage, as much as he can, politicians against whom he has a grievance. He had come under fire from the Conservative Party when in 2008 he led a search of Green’s offices — and arrested Green himself — in a hunt for leaked official documents on immigration which had embarrassed the then Labour government.

A year later, Quick was forced to resign after he inadvertently exposed details of a live counter-terrorism operation when photographed outside Downing Street holding an open document. Quick later suggested he had been forced to quit because certain politicians had not forgiven him for his arrest of Damian Green. And now it’s payback time.

Some may believe Quick’s insistence that he bears Green ‘ no malice’. Their number does not include Green himself, who angrily declared: ‘I’ve been aware for some years that Bob Quick has tried to cause me political damage by leaking false information about the raid on my parliamentary office.

‘The allegations are false, disreputable political smears from a discredited police officer acting in flagrant breach of his duty to keep the details of police investigations confidential, and amount to little more than an unscrupulous character assassination.’

Impossible

Unfortunately, the Met in recent years has been the useful idiot of someone engaged in ‘ unscrupulous character assassination’ on a breathtaking scale — a person known only as ‘Nick’, whose grotesque claims that he had been sexually abused by almost the entire British Establishment of the Seventies (including senior members of the Cabinet and Armed Forces) were taken as gospel truth by the Met: they even believed ‘ Nick’s’ claim that said Establishment had murdered children in front of his very eyes.

This reached its apogee in December 2014, when the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, gave a press conference broadcast on the BBC in which he pronounced ‘Nick’s’ claims to be ‘credible and true’. This was before a single alleged suspect had been questioned, let alone any of the supposedly murdered children either named or identified.

Which would have been impossible, because they never existed. It was all lies, and ‘Nick’ is now being investigated for perverting the course of justice.

Yesterday, we learned that the Metropolitan Commissioner at the time, Bernard Hogan-Howe, is also being investigated — by the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. It follows a complaint by the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, whom ‘Nick’ had falsely accused of abuse, torture and murder.

Proctor had heard Hogan-Howe being interviewed on LBC radio, criticising his colleague’s use of the phrase ‘credible and true’ to describe the (bizarre) accusations. But Proctor asserts that HoganHowe had known of and approved the use of this phrase, which completely reversed the crucial presumption that a man is innocent until proved guilty in court.

I had already noted the slipperiness of Hogan-Howe in this matter. In February 2016, when he sought to defend his force’s conduct, he told John Humphrys of the BBC’s Today programme that while his colleague had ‘ misspoken’ in saying ‘Nick’s’ claims were ‘ true’, the force should have been commended because ‘we acknowledged that fairly quickly — in a matter of days, not months’.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. It was not until September 21, 2015, that the Met put out a statement conceding that the words ‘credible and true’ should never have been used.

That was nine months after they had been broadcast to the nation — nine months in which those being investigated had to endure not only the dreadful torment of being falsely suspected of the vilest imaginable crimes, but the knowledge that the police would regard any denial on their part as a lie.

Because if what ‘Nick’ said must have been ‘credible and true’, then it follows as night follows day that anything his alleged abusers offered by way of rebuttal had to be a lie.

One of those accused was Britain’s greatest living military figure, Field Marshal Lord (Dwin) Bramall, a veteran of the D-Day landings and Chief of Staff during the Falklands War. This is the hero whose Surrey home was raided by 20 of Hogan- Howe’s officers while Bramall’s wife Avril lay dying there (she had Alzheimer’s).

As he described in a shattering interview in Saturday’s Mail, they turned the place upside down, to her huge distress — and it even emerged that the search warrant may not have been properly obtained. Bramall has since received substantial damages from the Metropolitan Police.

Last week, I attended a gathering at the Travellers Club in London to see Dwin Bramall — still formidably sharp at the age of nearly 94 — speak at the launch of the publication of his collected papers. I learned there that he had recently done something that sums up his sense of duty.

He had resigned from the House of Lords because he felt he no longer had the physical energy to play a worthwhile part in the debates and voting which is the role of that legislative chamber.

He also recognised that there is a public interest in seeing the swollen numbers of the upper house reduced (its bloated size is, among the world’s legislative chambers, now second only to the Congress of the People’s Republic of China).

Debasement

But more are still being created than resign: few are in the latter category, since most elderly peers enjoy being a member of the club too much, even if they play no real part in its legislative proceedings. And who do you think was last month elevated to membership of the Lords? Bernard Hogan-Howe, that’s who.

I imagine this only made Dwin Bramall more certain that he had done the right thing: it would have been appalling for him to see Hogan-Howe in the members’ dining room. But what a debasement of that chamber’s reputation it is to have a man such as Field Marshal Bramall effectively replaced by his former persecutor, the second-rate blusterer Hogan-Howe.

Still, there is one good thing to report. I recently met Hogan-Howe’s own replacement as Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick. She struck me as being in a different class, both in character and intellect, to her predecessor.

But, by God, she has a lot to sort out: not least in dealing with former colleagues who connive in the destruction of Cabinet ministers.