The ugly lynch mob hounding Mr Green

THIS paper does not pretend to know if First secretary Damian Green was in the habit of watching legal pornography on his Commons computer a decade ago – an allegation he resolutely denies.

If it is true, this is highly embarrassing to a man in his position – and his denials, if they are found to be dishonest, may yet cost him his job.

But isn’t one aspect of this affair more sinister by far than the claim that Mr Green watched porn – a weakness which is shared, let’s face it, by perhaps most teenage boys and countless adults?

this is the spectacle of former police officers, apparently driven by motives of vengeance, conspiring to destroy the career of an elected politician.

As agents of the state, police should never have been allowed to raid Mr Green’s office on the Parliamentary estate, in search of evidence to identify the mole who had leaked Home Office documents to him while he was in Opposition. the then speaker, Michael Martin, should have prevented them.

Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of Parliamentary democracy that correspondence between electors and MPs should be sacrosanct – and certainly not interfered with by the police.

Equally, where no crime is involved – as was established at the time in this case – police have a duty to keep information gained in the course of their inquiries confidential. By going public after all these years, the three former officers testifying against Mr Green are guilty of a flagrant abuse of trust.

But the failures don’t stop with the speaker’s office and the police. the Opposition, too, has displayed sanctimonious relish in seeking to capitalise on Mr Green’s embarrassment, while the BBC has given gleeful prominence to the ex-officers’ embittered allegations, which would perhaps have been more at home in a red-top paper.

Yes, the idea of a senior politician secretly watching porn is deeply unedifying. But isn’t the real scandal that Britain’s great institutions seem prepared to be complicit in the public lynching of a man who should be presumed innocent until proven guilty?