The Andrew Mitchell case has now become a very sticky soup indeed, with the arrest of a serving police officer on suspicion of leaking the Downing Street incident log to the press. At the same time comes the allegation that an officer - possibly the same one - emailed his MP (a colleague of Mitchell's in the Whip's Office with whom he did not get on) posing as a member of the public. This email apparently states that passers-by and tourists were upset by Mitchell's behaviour during the confrontation.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
