SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 7.12.08
New laws to permit search of MPs' offices without warrant
The Damian Green case has taken a new twist after it emerged that
ministers plan to legislate to make it easier for state officials to
raid MPs' offices without a warrant.
By Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor
A new Bill outlined in last week's Queen's Speech contains small
print which would allow officers of the Electoral Commission
unfettered powers to search MPs offices or homes.
If the Commons' Speaker tried to stop the searches, he would be
committing a criminal offence.
The details of the Political Parties and Elections Bill, seen by The
Sunday Telegraph, appear to blow out of the water claims by Michael
Martin, the Speaker, that in future no MP's office will be able to be
searched without a warrant.
Mr Martin, who is clinging to his job in the wake of the police raid
on the office of Mr Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman,
made his claim during his statement on the affair in the Commons last
week.
Last night Francis Maude, the shadow minister for the Cabinet Office,
branded ministers's new plans "alarming" and said they were a further
blow to parliamentary privilege.
Currently, Electoral Commission officials are allowed to make
unannounced raids, without a warrant, on the offices of political
parties, to search for information or documents.
The new Bill seeks to widen these powers to apply to the offices or
homes of "regulated donees", which include MPs. No warrant would be
needed - just a "disclosure notice" issued by the commission itself.
The new laws could also apply to the homes and offices of anyone who
has ever made a donation to a political party.
The Speaker told the House of Commons in his statement last week that
"from now on a warrant will always be required where a search of a
Member's office or access to a Member's Parliamentary papers is sought.
Every case must be referred for my personal decision as it is my
responsibility."
However, under the new proposals, he would not be consulted and he
would face arrest if he resisted.
=========================
TELEGRAPH 6.12.08
1. Scotland Yard chief's fury over MP's arrest
Sir Paul Stephenson, the acting head of Scotland Yard, had a furious
row with the senior officer who ordered the arrest of the
Conservative MP Damian Green.
By Andrew Pierce
Sir Paul, who had been the front-runner to succeed Sir Ian Blair as
Commissioner, now fears his chances have been damaged by the uproar
over the police search of Mr Green's office in the House of Commons.
The Daily Telegraph can disclose that when Bob Quick, the head of
anti-terrorism at the Metropolitan police, told Sir Paul he had
authorised the arrest, he replied: "You are completely ****????ing me
over you know. I will get the blame when it all goes wrong."
Sir Paul, in a frank exchange of views with Mr Quick, an assistant
commissioner, was appalled by the timing of the arrest, which took
place only hours before he took over as acting Commissioner after the
departure of Sir Ian. It was also just before the deadline for him to
submit his application to the Home Office for the most senior job in
British policing.
He told Mr Quick that if he moved to stop the arrest it would have
been leaked to the press "within hours". He would have been accused
by Labour of blocking a complaint from the Cabinet office and
protecting the Tory MP.
But by not reacting to the briefing, which he received from Mr Quick
in his office, he effectively sanctioned the arrest.
He told his colleague that in the inevitable political fallout with
the Tories, including London mayor Boris Johnson, he would be the one
who would be blamed and not Mr Quick, who is also a candidate for the
Commissioner's post.
Relations with the London Tory administration have soured because of
the arrest, although Sir Paul was credited with having told them
hours before the arrest that it was imminent.
Mr Johnson put to him in "trenchant" terms that he believed the move
to be a mistake and has publicly criticised the Met for their actions.
A friend of Sir Paul said that he conceded that he had been badly
damaged by the controversy but hoped that it had not destroyed his
ambition to succeed Sir Ian. He has privately admitted he should have
intervened by holding a meeting with advisers to consider the
ramifications of a high profile arrest of a Conservative Party
frontbencher.
Sir Paul has subsequently defended the actions of his officers but
admitted he has "proper concerns" about the political backlash caused
by the investigation into Mr Green. He has now called on Ian
Johnston, chief of the British Transport Police and chairman of the
Association of Chief Police Officers crime committee, to produce a
report within a week on the leak inquiry.
One senior source said: "Paul Stephenson knows he should have
convened a meeting of some sort to consult on the impact of the
arrest of an MP and search of his Commons office but he did not do that.
"There is a feeling in some quarters of Scotland Yard that he has
been completely stitched-up. But Stephenson is adamant to this day
that he was damned if he did block the arrest and damned if he did not."
A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: "We would not discuss any internal
conversations between senior officers in the run-up to this arrest.
We can't make any comment."
Insiders said that Mr Quick would not have deliberately sought to
land his boss in trouble, and said that at worst he is guilty of
being "politically naïve" to the consequences of the controversial
inquiry.
Mr Quick has also defended his role and apparently contradicted the
version of events told by Michael Martin, the House of Commons Speaker.
The anti-terror chief insisted that police followed correct
procedures when raiding the office of the shadow minister. The
intervention left Mr Martin's position looking increasingly untenable.
==================AND---->
2. Speaker Michael Martin is a disgrace to his office amid Damian
Green arrest scandal
By Simon Heffer
It is partly because the House of Commons has become a debased
institution since the coming of New Labour that I have found it so
hard to get worked up about the Speaker, Michael Martin. Elected to
his post by the mindless Labour majority, and without any regard to
whether he could actually do his job properly, he fulfilled the maxim
that you get what you deserve.
However, his conduct in the past 10 days since the police raided
Damian Green's office has been disgusting even by his standards. In
an age when people are cynical in the extreme about politicians, he
has shown us there is still plenty more scope to be appalled by them.
The police and Mr Martin are in dispute about who said what to whom
and when. That need not concern us. The important point about Mr
Martin is that, first, he broke with tradition by giving someone
plainly agreeable to him the post of Serjeant-at-Arms; and, second,
that when something that should have been his responsibility went
horribly wrong, he chose in the most undignified fashion to blame her.
The Speaker is often accused of being biased towards the Labour
Party. In shifting the blame from himself as an elected politician to
an official, he shows he is very much still a Labour man: for that is
how they routinely behave.
The Serjeant, Jill Pay, is manifestly out of her depth. The Speaker
seems to have disliked her predecessor because he was a senior ex-
Army officer (Mr Martin has the most enormous chip on his shoulder
about the officer class) who had a deep understanding of, and
reverence for, the traditions of the House.
As the Green affair has shown, traditions are not simply about
keeping something quaint for the tourists. They are also about
protecting the constitution and, in this specific case, the rights of
elected MPs and their constituents.
It is easy to assume that Mr Martin was happy to condone the raid on
Mr Green's office because he saw the victim as a political opponent
whose ordeal would cheer up the Speaker's chums in the Labour Party.
I have no idea whether or not that is true. Sadly, Mr Martin's
inadequate conduct as Speaker over the past eight years would give
much cause to think it might be.
However, there is a deeper problem. It is Labour's (and I include Mr
Martin in that group) lack of regard for history, and for the
liberties hard-won throughout the past few hundred years.
Had he appointed a Serjeant-at-Arms who understood the Commons and
the rights of its members, the police would have been turned away at
the door. There is no question in my mind that Mrs Pay has shown
herself quite unsuitable for her job and that she should resign: and
be replaced by someone with the intelligence, background and
character to do the job properly.
Neither she nor the Speaker should have intimated that consent to
search Mr Green's office without a warrant, and have access to
confidential correspondence between him and his constituents, would
ever be given. However, they did.
This is the Speaker's ultimate responsibility. He shows his complete
unfitness for his office first by apparently condoning a serious
breach of the constitution, and second by trying to shift the blame
on to an official once he was rumbled. He is a disgrace to his
office; it is hard to think of a worse Speaker in history.
His job is to defend the rights of the House of Commons. His failure
could not be more complete. If he is not prepared to resign, then MPs
need to make him. And those who would rather not uphold freedom and
democracy in this way should be prepared to explain to their electors
why.
Leaking is bad (unless Labour is doing it)
Talking of warped politicians, nothing was more comical this week
than hearing our old friend Lord Rumba of Rio - the artist formerly
known as Peter Mandelson - doing an imitation of almost demented self-
righteousness about the Green affair, claiming that Tory protests
were merely a tactic to divert attention from their wrongdoing.
When Lord Rumba ran the Labour press office in the Eighties, the
party specialised in exploiting leaks about the wicked Tory
government of Margaret Thatcher. He has changed his tune since then,
as men without scruple or conventional morality are wont to do.
I was entertained last weekend by film of Gordon Brown, shot in 1985,
piously defending the retailing of leaked information about Tory
plans for supplementary benefit as being in the public interest.
How interesting that in his eyes, and those of the former mortgage
fiddler Lord Rumba, it is not considered in the public interest to
reveal Labour lies about illegal immigration. Now why might that be?
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