So Andrew Mitchell, the Chief Whip, has a run-in with the Downing St police officers. Cue earnest correspondents on TV and in the press pointing out how bad this looks in the light of the killing in Manchester of two policewomen. The Police make sacrifices for us, they intone, and it ill behoves a Tory minister to treat them with disrespect.
I have no particular taste for Mitchell, who looks typical of his kind, but it's funny how the press has chosen the murdered WPCs as a context for his conduct. They could instead have chosen the Met officer who pushed the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson to the ground. Or the South Yorkshire police who perjured themselves after the Hillsborough disaster.
But that would make Andrew Mitchell, pleb or no pleb, look pretty decent, wouldn't it?
