Gategate revisited

I here republish an extract from a posting I wrote some months ago about the Andrew Mitchell affair. Given recent events, it seems to stand up reasonably well.

 

'According to the original story, [Mr Mitchell] was told ‘ security rules mean they open the main gate as little as possible’.

 

Is that so? So do they keep two or three ministerial or ambassadorial cars waiting in convoys,  inside and outside , until there are enough of them to justify opening it? And do they tell their impatient passengers that if they wish to leave sooner they must get out of their cars and walk through the pedestrian gate? Do you know, I rather doubt it.

 

If anyone watched the gate all day, I think they’d find it was opening and shutting the whole time, and opening it for Mr Mitchell (or anyone else)  on his bike really didn’t make much difference to the daily tally. Short of shutting it the whole time, and building a tunnel for the occupants, it’s going to have to be opened quite a lot.  So why not for a cyclist?   I wonder how many cyclists pass through each day, and how many cars and vans? After all, here’s a conundrum. It’s illegal to ride a bike on the pavement, but legal to ride it on the road,  because it’s a vehicle. So why must it stop being a vehicle when it comes to opening a gate designed for vehicles? Again, it seems to come back to the second-class status of bikes and their riders.

 

So Mr Mitchell, despite his unpleasant foul-mouthed outburst, might have a sort of case.

 

Then other doubts come trickling in. How did this story reach the ‘Sun’ newspaper, exactly? Who told the ‘Sun’, and on what terms? We’re told that tourists and members of the public were said to have been ‘visibly shocked’. Have any come forward to say so? Did these outraged individuals tell the ‘Sun’ about the incident? Or did someone else? If so, who?

 

Were the outraged members of the public interviewed as potential witnesses by the outraged police officers? There are enough of them (police officers I mean, not outraged ones necessarily) around there, on both sides of the gate, to do this if necessary.  I’m faintly concerned about this because the tourists who hang around Downing Street are mostly from abroad and wouldn’t have known who Mr Mitchell was (most British people wouldn’t have done, then, either) . They might not even have known he was swearing, foreign swearing being a completely different thing from ours.   And it’s a noisy location. The last time I bicycled past it, which may have been last Wednesday, as it happened, there was a very noisy demonstration on the other side of Whitehall, which seemed to be something to do with legal protection for prostitutes, or ‘sex workers’ as they are now termed. The word ‘SLUT!’ was being used quite vigorously, if I remember rightly, cutting through the mighty roar of London’s traffic. Though not ‘Pleb!’ or ‘****!’.

 

Since then we seem to have learned a bit about the police officers involved. One was a woman. A connection, which seems to me to be pretty tenuous, was made with the murder of two policewomen in Manchester. This is a horrible event, but it doesn’t actually have much to do with this much less important moment in our national life. They considered arresting him under the Public Order Act, or so we are told.  Well, why didn’t they if they were so appalled?  Chief Whips are not above the law.

 

The evidence against him could then have been tested, first by the CPS and then on oath in a court of law. This, increasingly seems to me to be the most satisfactory ending. It’s been suggested that if Mr Mitchell disputes what has been said,  he should either sue the officers or quit, but I think a criminal court would be a better place.

 

There’s also a sad thing to add, about how police officers in general (some nobly resist, and I know it) have been transformed from a fairly genial bunch of public servants, generally ready to do a bit of give-and-take with anybody, into grim-jawed and humourless robocops, festooned with machine-pistols, tasers, handcuffs and big clubs, and got up like soldiers in some future fantasy of hunger and chaos.

 

When, long ago, I worked at the House of Commons, the coppers who guarded the building were of the genial type, big, often bearded, wise, infinitely experienced, discreet and humorous, and boy, did they work at knowing who all the MPs were. The moment the election results were in, they got hold of the leaflets and made picture directories. Within a week or two of the new Parliament assembling they could greet every member by name. significantly, they still wore the old uniform of tunic and helmet, and I am quite sure this made them behave more like sworn citizens in the office of constable,  and less like cops (the unlovely word the ‘Sun’ likes to use to describe British policemen and policewomen these days).

 

This was fantastic security, of course, better than any computer, because they also knew instantly if they saw people in parts of the building who shouldn’t have been there.

 

In those days, there were just a few crowd barriers at the entrance to Downing Street. And the coppers on duty were the old sort. The ludicrous, hideous Ceausescu-style barriers that are now there had not yet been built, and ‘security’ wasn’t the ultimate, unanswerable excuse for shutting off politicians from the public that it has since become, though by then we had had nearly 20 years of the IRA blowing up London, a much greater material threat than the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda’ menace.'