Why did the boys in blue take on Green?
People are belatedly focusing on the extraordinary treatment of Damian Green by some ex-police officers. Even if it turns out that he did watch legal pornography on his Commons computer (which Mr Green denies), no crime would have been involved: it would have been none of the police’s business.
Two thoughts occur. The first is that the current police should condemn the retired ones. Cressida Dick, the respected Met Commissioner, should state publicly that it is wrong for police officers to keep their notebooks when they have left their posts, and more wrong still to regurgitate their jottings in public.
The second is to ask why what looks like a vendetta exists. No doubt there are particular reasons related to the case involved, but is there a wider one, too? When Theresa May was home secretary, she was very hard on the police. Perhaps the police did not forgive her.
Once Sue Gray, the Cabinet Office’s head of ethics, has finished working out whether or not Mr Green touched a woman’s knee, she might usefully turn her attention to the ethics of the constabulary. GQ stands for Gentlemen’s
Quarterly. The magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones, behaved in a definitely ungentlemanly fashion by revealing how, in the course of interviewing Jeremy Corbyn, GQ’S young staff found him to be a sphinx without a riddle. Editors are not supposed to attack the behind-thescenes behaviour of the people they have invited to appear in their pages. I found Jones’s remarks interesting, however, because they confirmed afresh what I first learnt in 1983.
In that year, Mr Corbyn entered the House of Commons. He immediately made his name for being very hard Left, very keen on all groupings and movements that hated Britain, America and Israel, and very, very boring. As a lobby journalist at that time, I often heard his speeches. They lacked any interest whatever.
Nowadays, Mr Corbyn is more carefully presented to the world. For the GQ photo-shoot, his team let him be photographed with his sleeves rolled up. This was supposed to show that he was getting down to work for Britain, but in fact he looked more like a pensioner waiting for his flu jab.
I keep telling young people who adulate Mr Corbyn for his authenticity that he is by some way the most limited and useless person ever to lead one of our two main political parties, and that his inadequacy has been visible for more than 30 years, when they either weren’t alive or weren’t paying attention. They won’t believe me, of course. They think my opinion is coloured by bias or cynicism. Yet it is God’s own truth, and I am glad the bright young things on GQ have now spotted it.
“I love Nottingham,” Prince Harry has declared. He and his fiancée, Meghan Markle, had a highly successful visit there on Friday. As the relation of a 19th-century Lord Mayor of the city, I feel a tiny share in the local pride.
There is a potential trap here, though. Years ago, when the Queen was 70, I commissioned a profile of her for this newspaper. The author unearthed a revealing little story. The Queen was about to visit a northern city and was presented with a draft of the speech she was to give there. “I am very pleased to be in X,” it said. The Queen studied the draft and then crossed out the word “very”.
Why? No doubt it was part of the natural moderation of her character. But I think she had an almost constitutional motive, too. She is Queen equally of everywhere in the kingdom. She must not favour one place over another. She should always try to be pleased (however difficult it may sometimes be) to be wherever she is. But if she claims to be “very” pleased, she must say it every time, everywhere. And if she declared she loved one place, she would raise the stakes dangerously high. If she said she loved everywhere she went in her 16 realms, people would find it hard to believe her. So, wisely, she doesn’t start down that track. She is always polite, never effusive.
No doubt Prince Harry will get away with loving Nottingham. His youthful ardour is attractive. No one, at this moment, could sensibly take offence if he fails to say he loves Middlesbrough, Swindon or wherever. But over the longer term, being royal involves being equally, mildly nice to everyone – which is why it is one of the most exhausting roles in the world.
Our local MP, Huw Merriman, spotted something in a parliamentary debate last Friday. A new SNP member, David Linden, while speaking, suddenly started mumbling. Mr Merriman managed to hear what he had said, however. It was that members of the House of Lords were “ermine vermin”.
This is unparliamentary language, so Mr Merriman raised it as a point of order. The Speaker admitted he had not heard it and reprimanded Mr Linden. What was the point of Mr Linden’s little trick? The mumbling is a device to escape reproof in the Chamber but get your rude words into Hansard’s record. These are then reproduced in your constituency media to please your hardline party supporters (in this case, in Glasgow East). Apparently it is quite a common ploy. It is good that Mr Speaker smelt a rat.