It's always hard to spot the significance of things when you're in the middle of it, isn't it? A random decision to change your library books might lead to a chance meeting with someone who alters the course of your life. Some such mundane committee decision (The PM is really fed up with these immigration leaks. Isn't there something we can do about it?) will no doubt be found to be at the root of the intemperate action taken yesterday against Damien Green. But it won't matter. What matters is the symbolism of the outcome of the decision.
The Met, unfortunately, have a history of politicised activity on behalf of the government - the interventions over 42 days detention jumps to mind - and of lying to cover up their actions when they're caught. When Jean Charles de Menezes was executed, we were fed a tissue of lies about his activity prior to his death (he did not look like a suspected terrorist, he was not wearing a bulky jacket, he did not vault over the tube barrier and run from the police, he did not resist arrest when confronted on the tube, the officers who murdered him did not give him a verbal warning before holding him down and pumping his head full of bullets). So it's too much to expect us now to believe that Damien Green's arrest was not the result of a political decision, taken at the highest level, implemented with the full panoply of New Labour's terror laws. We really aren't fools, Prime Minister, and your strategy of believing us to be such is in tatters.
Why pick on Damien Green, palpably one of Westminster's nice guys? It's quite obvious. The government and the Met will have known that they had little or no chance of finding anything criminal to do with something as unimportant (to the national interest) as a leak about immigration figures (figures which should have been in the public domain - thank God for Damien Green - another matter). But they must have calculated and hoped that by subjecting the poor man to a forensic investigation they would turn up something, anything, which would damage Mr Green's image to the public eye. How many of us would happily open up every single document and computer file to the public view? That they haven't managed to find anything embarrassing is just further evidence about Mr Green's character.
Now someone will have to pay. Since it's impossible to believe that this action was undertaken without ministerial approbation, let's start by demanding the exit of Jacquie Smith. But make sure, for being at the head of a corrupt administration, for being happy to engage in politico-judicial activism against a member of Her Majesty's Opposition, let's make sure that this stain attaches to Gordon Brown, the prime infection of the body politic.
Politically, Monday's mess of a PBR was the end of the beginning for Brown's ministry. Sanctioning the arrest of the Conservative member for Ashford should be the beginning of the end. We don't just require the replacement of a tired Labour administration with a fresh Tory one; as with London's mayor, so with Britain's prime minister: we require, emotionally, to chase these corrupt and venal horrors from public office. Catharsis required.
