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The Mail on Sunday has unearthed a new twist to this dreadful tale.  
It alleges considerable breaches of the law as the counter-terrorist 
police tried to entrap Damian Green.   They also appear to have got 
the original 'whistle-blower' tucked away in semi-detention and under 
their control.

The Sunday Times, in addition to the report second below also says 
"Mr Green's opposite number, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas 
acknowledged he was not certain ministers were unaware of the 
action."   If unaware this would raise the question that if Boris 
Johnson was told in advance and expressed his displeasure, why was 
the Home Secretary NOT told ?  It is quite literally 'incredible'.

This scandal has reached the point of constitutional outrage when the 
police act without any regard for the law and ministers appear tyo 
condone this.  There is a remedy which I would suggest be used.

On Thursday the Queen opens a new session of parliament and sends 
Black Rod to summon the Commons to the Lords to hear the 'Queen's 
Speech' [ie Gordon Brown's speech read by the Queen].  At this point 
the door to the Commons is traditionally slammed in Black Rod's 
face.  He then has to hammer on the door to gain admittance.  The 
Commons - or at least the Tories and LibDems - should prevent the 
door being opened until the Speaker accounts for his failure to 
protect them.  This would make a major scandal, using traditional  
methods to protest,  while being in no way disrespectful to Her Majesty.

If anyone agrees with this please suggest it to your MP urgently.  
Even some  Labour MPs might agree too.

Christina
=========================
MAIL ON SUNDAY   30.11.08
Police accused of using phone calls from Home Office mole in bid to 
entrap Shadow Minister

By SIMON WALTERS

The police used a Whitehall whistleblower to try to lure Conservative 
frontbencher Damian Green into incriminating himself, it was claimed 
last night.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the Shadow Immigration Minister, 
who was controversially arrested for allegedly leaking information 
embarrassing to the Government, may have been the victim of an 
entrapment plot.

However, the allegations were firmly denied by Scotland Yard last night.
Senior Westminster sources believe that police tried to persuade the 
alleged whistleblower, Home Office aide Christopher Galley, to call 
Mr Green.

The civil servant made contact with the MP on more than one occasion, 
but Mr Green declined to be drawn into conversation.

The sources say they suspect Mr Galley's calls - made soon after his 
own arrest 11 days ago - were being secretly monitored by the police 
in an attempt to gather evidence against Mr Green.

The claims come as The Mail on Sunday reveals shocking details about 
the affair, including:
. Mr Green was arrested in a car park - in full view of the public - 
near to his home in Kent.
. Mr Galley was arrested in a 5.50am dawn raid and is now being 
accommodated in a Home Office 'safe house' to prevent him talking to 
the media.
. It was alleged that police intercepted Mr Green's mobile phone 
messages after Mr Galley's arrest.

The disclosures raise disturbing new questions about the abuse of 
parliamentary privilege and the creeping growth of surveillance, 
adding to the existing outrage over Mr Green's arrest from MPs on all 
sides and prompting further questions over the conduct of the police, 
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Speaker Michael Martin.

Mr Galley - a Conservative supporter who stood as a Tory candidate in 
the 2004 elections for Sunderland Council - was seized at his home in 
a 5.50am raid on November 19.

Shortly afterwards, and, crucially, before Mr Green had been 
contacted by police, Mr Galley contacted the MP.

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the call may have been an 
attempt by police to use Mr Galley to extract more information from 
Mr Green, without the MP being aware of the ploy.

Mr Green declined to get involved in a conversation with Mr Galley, 
partly through fear that the police were bugging the conversation. 
Instead he advised the 26-year-old aide to obtain legal advice.

Some sources say the police may have attempted to persuade Mr Galley 
to give evidence against Mr Green.

Senior police sources last night confirmed that Mr Galley had called 
Mr Green shortly after his arrest, but firmly denied any suggestion 
that he had been forced to make the call.

It is also believed police may have intercepted the MP's mobile phone 
messages without informing him.

Laws governing the police tapping of phones are complex. Legal 
experts say officers need the Home Secretary's permission to 
intercept live messages - but not if they approach phone companies to 
check past messages.

A Home Office spokesman said last night: 'As the Home Secretary has 
made clear, she has had no involvement in any aspect of this 
investigation.'
Scotland Yard also denied monitoring Mr Green's messages.

If Mr Green's communications had been intercepted it would be a 
breach of the so-called Wilson doctrine, named after Prime Minister 
Harold Wilson, who pledged that MPs' phones would never be tapped. 
Subsequent Prime Ministers, including Gordon Brown, have stated that 
the doctrine still stands.

The row took another dramatic turn last night with reports that 
police had claimed privately that they already had enough evidence to 
charge Mr Green.

Last night, Scotland Yard refused to discuss the case. An official 
said: 'This is an ongoing investigation and it would be inappropriate 
to discuss any details.'

But she added: 'We strongly refute any suggestion that any officer 
has acted improperly.'

Mr Galley had allegedly given Mr Green secret information about a 
number of Home Office scandals, many involving illegal immigrants.

Police arrested Mr Green on suspicion he had broken an obscure law 
which bans the 'procurement' of Whitehall secrets.

Among documents taken from Mr Green's home were bank statements, 
apparently in an attempt to find out if he had paid Mr Galley for 
information.

The MP denies offering money or any other kind of inducement.

As well as raiding Mr Green's home and Commons office, police seized 
his mobile phone and BlackBerry and froze his Commons email account, 
which was reinstated only yesterday.

The Tories insist Mr Green has done nothing wrong and that he was 
acting in the public interest to expose Government incompetence and 
cover-ups.
They have also raised questions about ministerial involvement in the 
arrests.

A Tory insider said: 'The more we learn about this, the more 
disturbing it becomes. The police treatment of Mr Green has been a 
disgrace and the Government's fingerprints are all over it.'

Mr Green's contacts with Mr Galley were approved by his former boss, 
ex-Shadow Home Secretary David Davis.

Yesterday it emerged that Mr Galley had applied for a job with 
another Shadow Minister but was turned down.

The Home Office is now paying for Mr Galley to stay in a 'safe 
house'. ]That is effectively keeping him in custody which is totally 
illegal -cs]

A spokesman said: 'When it became clear that a large number of 
journalists would be camped outside his door, he was offered the 
chance to move somewhere else and accepted the offer.'

Both Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith have insisted that the police 
acted 'without either ministerial involvement or authorisation'.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve has released more than 50 
questions he said the Government had to answer, including who 
initiated the original leak inquiry and whether Commons Speaker 
Michael Martin authorised the raid on Mr Green's office.
=========================
SUNDAY TIMES   30.11.08
Yard at war over arrest of Tory MP

David Leppard

SCOTLAND YARD was in turmoil last night after senior police officials 
criticised its new boss and admitted its handling of the arrest of a 
Tory MP had been "catastrophic".

David Blunkett, the former home secretary, called on the cabinet to 
review the procedures that led to the police raids on Damian Green's 
home and Commons office.

As the political storm grew, MPs and civil liberties groups 
questioned the role of Sir Paul Stephenson, who took temporary charge 
of the Metropolitan police when Sir Ian Blair left office last week. 
[But the officer authorising the mass raid was the Assistant 
Commissioner in charge of Counter Terriorism -cs] Stephenson was 
regarded as the favourite to succeed Blair, but one senior police 
officer described him yesterday as "easy meat".

A senior official on the Metropolitan Police Authority, the Met's 
watchdog, said his oversight of the police inquiry into the leak of 
sensitive Whitehall documents to Green, the Tory immigration 
spokesman, raised important questions about his judgment and cast 
doubt over his prospects.

The official said Stephenson should have told Sir David Normington, 
the Home Office permanent secretary who called in police, that leaks 
of nonclassified information were not a matter for a police inquiry.

Normington will chair the panel that will interview and vet 
applicants for the job of Met commissioner. The deadline for 
applications is tomorrow.
The police official said: "Why didn't the Met just [tell the Home 
Office] to use discipline and misconduct rules instead of agreeing to 
a criminal inquiry? What this all hinges on is judgment and 
proportionality. Sir Paul has got a huge problem with this.
"This is a big problem for the Met. They have managed to get every 
main political party and everyone in the media against them. For the 
Met it's catastrophic. I think this could damage Sir Paul's prospects."

The pressure on Stephenson grew as it emerged that the raids had not 
been approved by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer. A 
spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide 
whether Green should face criminal charges, said Starmer had been 
told about the arrest only shortly before detectives moved in last 
Thursday.

Calling for a review of "operational methodology in the light of 
Damian Green's arrest", Blunkett said it also "would be prudent for 
the cabinet to consider reviewing the process by which the police 
have access to the offices and confidential material of MPs. It's 
clear that whatever process is currently in place is not sufficiently 
robust to give confidence either to MPs themselves, their 
constituents or the wider community".

The civil servant said to have given Green the leaked Home Office 
documents was named last night as Chris Galley, who worked in the 
private office of the home secretary, Jacqui Smith. Speculation was 
rife in Westminster that his conversations with Green had been bugged 
by police. The Home Office insisted Smith had not known of the 
impending arrest and had not signed any warrant to tap Green's phone 
calls.
===========================
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH   30.11.08
Labour doesn't mind leaks - so long as it is doing the leaking
By Matthew d'Ancona

This time last week, Gordon Brown was still flexing his messiah's 
muscles, posing as the superhero saviour of the global financial 
system and preparing to unveil a pre-Budget report that would catch 
the Tory toffs off-guard, protect the needy and soak the rich.
Seven days on, the Prime Minister has somehow contrived to look more 
like a cross between Mugabe, Charles I and Big Brother; and the 
Tories, rightly outraged by the arrest and detention of Damian Green, 
are less Bullingdon boys than Woodward and Bernstein.

It takes a lot of work to secure the mantle of people's tribune and 
the PM must be seething that it has been wrenched away from him so 
speedily. Brown's recovery strategy has been to present himself as 
uniquely confident and qualified, an expert stretching out the hand 
of economic reassurance to a troubled electorate.

Suddenly, his Government looks oppressive, cack-handed and deceitful: 
if any minister knew of Mr Green's arrest in advance, he or she 
should have stopped it. If none of them knew - which, frankly, is 
very hard to believe - then who is running the show, as counter-
terrorist policemen charge into an MP's homes and offices? When the 
tough guy's tough guy, David Blunkett, accuses you of "overkill", you 
know you have overstepped the mark.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, cannot believe their luck: without 
lifting a finger, they have been recast in the national political 
drama as plucky tribunes of truth, fighting the jackbooted shock 
troops of the Brown Terror. This may be an exaggeration, but it is no 
more of one than the notion, still current a week ago, that Gordon 
was personally going to save us all from economic perdition.

Next time the Home Office and the police decide to pick on a Tory MP, 
I suggest they select someone other than Mr Green; anyone else, in 
fact. The shadow immigration minister is a sharp operator, but he is 
also one of the nicest human beings on the planet, what Wodehouse 
would have called a "wonderfully woolly baa lamb". It is precisely 
because of his reassuring and pleasant countenance that Cameron 
appointed him to the immigration brief. Nobody could plausibly accuse 
Mr Green of playing the race card or unleashing "rivers of blood" - 
not with a straight face, anyway.

His opposite number in the Government, Phil Woolas, is much scarier. 
The arrest has turned Mr Green into the Andrew Sachs of politics, 
with Sir Paul Stephenson, the acting Commissioner of the Met, and 
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, as the Russell Brand and Jonathan 
Ross of the saga. The public don't like radio presenters who leave 
obscene messages on an actor's answering machine. No more do the 
electorate like the 15-year-old daughter of an entirely respectable 
MP being reduced to tears by counter-terrorist police.

And - boy - did the authorities choose the wrong issue on which to 
pick such a public fight over whistle-blowing. When the MoD official 
Clive Ponting sent documents related to the sinking of the Belgrano 
to Tam Dalyell in 1984, he excited little popular sympathy: the 
punters had pretty much made their minds up about that particular 
event and the Sun headline "Gotcha" more or less summed it up.
Ditto Sarah Tisdall, the FCO official jailed for leaking information 
about US cruise missiles to the Guardian in 1983. Though the presence 
of American nuclear weapons on British soil was divisive, the 
realities of the Cold War gave the Tory government of the day the 
upper hand in managing public opinion.

But this case is very different. Immigration is - and has long been - 
a high priority for voters, consumed by a growing suspicion that they 
are having the wool pulled over their eyes by a Government incapable 
of policing the nation's borders. Thirty years ago, public anxiety of 
this sort was indeed motivated mostly by fear of cultural change and 
ever-greater ethnic diversity.

In 2008, ethnicity is no longer, I believe, the key issue: it is 
control. The voters simply do not believe that the Government is up 
to running the system, making it work.

Consider two of the leaks at the heart of this case: in November 
2007, internal memos indicated that the Home Secretary was involved 
in covering up the approval of 5,000 illegal immigrants as security 
guards; in February, our Deputy Political Editor revealed that an 
illegal immigrant had been working at the Commons using a fake pass. 
By any sane standards, the disclosure of this information was 
overwhelmingly in the public interest.

Sir David Normington, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, says 
that the leaks "risked undermining the effective operation of my 
department". On the contrary: what the leaks show is that Sir David 
and his colleagues had that side of things covered already. The 
effective operation of the Home Office has been undermined, not by 
leaks, but by its political masters, its officials and its inadequate 
or unenforced policies.

Inevitably, the constitutional experts are being wheeled out to 
explain why this marks a deadly assault on the ancient liberties of 
Parliament, a return to the autocracy of Charles I (a "constitutional 
expert" being defined as a historian who gives journalists his home 
phone number). It certainly appears that this was a monstrous 
infringement of parliamentary privilege and one which Michael Martin, 
the Speaker of the House, should have opposed on principle.

Yet the heart of this confrontation is not ancestral liberty, but the 
modern question of information and its control. When he was a spin-
doctor - or perhaps one should say, only a spin-doctor - Peter 
Mandelson used to argue that the essence of communication was getting 
information out when, where and how you desired. That became the 
strategic foundation stone of New Labour, and the era of spin. Never 
again, the Blairites declared, would their party be savaged by the 
press. The media would be wooed and tamed, and the flow of 
information meticulously managed.

What New Labour objects to is not leaking. What Labour objects to is 
other people doing it. For 11 years, the party has governed by pre-
announcement, briefing, media manipulation and targeted leaks (often 
to drive unhelpful stories off the front page). But woe betide anyone 
- MP or newspaper - that threatens its monopoly. When this newspaper 
leaked the Macpherson Inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence in 
1999, Jack Straw, then the home secretary, went ballistic and The 
Sunday Telegraph was injuncted. Ministers quickly faced the 
embarrassment of the ludicrous injunction being lifted.

Why, I wondered at the time, had they been so irrationally furious? 
Because, momentarily, they had lost command of their beloved "grid": 
the matrix of information control and dispersal at the heart of the 
New Labour machine.

Ministers deny that they knew in advance about Mr Green's arrest. [If 
they did NOT they should have done.  If they DID, then they lie -cs]  
What they cannot deny is that, after 11 years, they have created a 
culture of expectation in the machinery of state, that stretches from 
permanent secretary to police officer, in which the control of 
information is the defining feature of power. These leaks were an 
intolerable loss of that control. The irony is that this fixation led 
to an inquiry and an insanely ill-judged arrest that will only foster 
the public's impression that nobody is in control at all.
-----------------------------------------------
Matthew d'Ancona is Editor of 'The Spectator'