John Yates has previous

When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much. By some mysterious process of osmosis between detectives and the leading crime correspondents, details of that dramatic armed robbery in Croydon would be all over the front pages while the Yard’s official spokesmen were still confined to talking lamely about ‘an incident on Purley Way which required police attendance’.

I do not know how much has changed. In our 24/7 media world everything is sharper and faster. Dawn raids have TV crews primed to film the drama, sometimes to the anger of innocent communities. Potentially significant details about suspects, along with photos and even CCTV footage, appear in the newspapers, or on the evening news. Juries eventually get to see grainy film of how the gunman ran amok, as it happened. Some lawyers and journalists worry about ever-bolder media disclosures which may prejudice trials.

Enter stage centre-left Tony Blair, his No. 10 staffers, plus Lord Levy, who are now facing the twelfth month of Scotland Yard’s inquiry into alleged ‘loans for honours’. It is led by ‘Yates of the Yard’, recently promoted Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the coming man, to whom I will return.

At this stage in his career Blair does not enjoy widespread sympathy: he is fair game. So rarely a week passes without fresh allegations in the press or on TV that detectives are confident of charging some of the suspects, that Downing Street has been hiding relevant material, that it has a ‘secret’ email system, or that encrypted references to ‘Ps’ and ‘Ks’ (what can that mean?) have been unearthed.

In mid-February the leaks briefly stopped, only to restart despite last weekend’s doomed injunction strategy, deployed against the ever-more flamboyant BBC, later the Guardian.