The framing of Damian Green

It took them 9 years and 4 attempts, but the Met Police’s cynical vendetta has finally achieved . . .

THIS week a senior Minister of the Crown faces being framed by the nation’s largest police force. Technically, the Cabinet Office will rule on whether Damian Green breached the ministerial code by viewing pornography on a work computer nine years ago. But in reality what he is confronting is not the culmination of a dry Westminster investigation, but death by cop.

There is little need to await the outcome of the official inquiry by Sue Gray, the imposingly titled Director General of Propriety and Ethics at the Cabinet Office. Everyone can already see Green is the victim of stitch-up. A stitch-up so staggeringly cynical, blatant and destructive, it boggles the mind that its perpetrators – the Metropolitan Police Service – actually thought they could get away with it.

In November 2008, the Met marched into Dam ian Green’ s office and his home, and arrested him as a part of a search for evidence that he had been involved in a criminal conspiracy to solicit leaked information detrimental to national security. Their investigation proved fruitless.

A month later, they had another go. Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick publicly accused the Conservative Party ‘and their press allies’ of attempting to undermine his investigation into Green.

But they weren’t. And the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed Green had done nothing that warranted prosecution. So Quick was forced to withdraw the allegation.

For several years the Met let the matter rest. But like their Canadian cousins the Mounties, they remained committed to getting their man.

So last month, when Damian Green found himself accused of sexual impropriety, they had a third go. Reports suddenly emerged that, in the course of their initial search, ‘extreme pornography’ had been found on his computer.

It was claimed the images were so grotesque that had they been found a few months later, when pornography laws were changed, Green would have committed an offence. Indeed, they were ‘so disturbing’ that they were referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible charges, a source told the media.

There were calls for Green to immediately stand down. But he didn’t. So undeterred, the Met had a fourth go. On Friday the BBC reported that ‘thousands of images’ were found on his computer. They weren’t actually extreme. Or on the border of legality. There never was a referral to the DPP for a charging decision. But they apparently left the officer who found them ‘shocked’. Green ‘should have resigned a long time ago,’ he added.

This morning, Theresa May is said to be weighing up whether she should stand by one of her closest Cabinet colleagues.

Allegations that he touched the knee of a female journalist have been deemed impossible to prove either way. So I’m told the key to her decision will be if Damian Green lied when he said he never personally downloaded or viewed the images.

Allies who have loyally backed him are nervous. ‘If it’s proven he sent an email at 14.30, and then an image was downloaded at 14.31, he’s toast,’ a friend conceded to me.

And they’re clearly right. If Green is judged to have lied to the Prime Minister, she will have no option but to sack him.

But make no mistake, if Green is forced out, then that will be the true scandal. The police had no business being in his office in the first place. They had no business investigating and recording legal images.

They had no business leaking – almost a decade after the event – the existence of those images. They had no business lying about what those images contained. And they had no business attempting to drive him out of office.

‘If it happened in any other job, the person would have been sacked,’ their defenders cry. But MPs do not have any other job. They are the people’s representatives. It is the voters who decide whether to sack them, not the embittered agents of the forces of law and order.

The job of the police is supposed to be to root out illegality. Not act as HR directors with truncheons, or self-styled guardians of the nation’s morals. Day in, day out we see police spokesmen and women pleading that the thin blue line is being stretched to breaking point. And yet we are now being told we should also give them licence to march into every home and workplace in a prurient hunt for Dirk Diggler and Linda Lovelace.

Damian Green may yet be caught in a lie. But if he is, it will be because he has fallen into a trap set and sprung by the Met.

They have form in hunting down Cabinet Ministers. Even if it takes the best part of ten years to claim their prey. At the beginning, I asked how the Met thought they could possibly get away with a stitch-up that was a decade in the planning, and contained so many missteps and falsehoods.

Yet this week we – and the Deputy Prime Minister – may find they have done precisely that.