Justice is being done as relations between Downing Street and Sir Hugh Orde sour, again

“Busy?” I asked a friend who’s training as a criminal barrister. “You could say that.” Magistrates’ courts have sat through a second straight night. “I finished at five,” said my friend. “Back in court at 8.”

The courts are determined to deliver what David Cameron described as “the full force of the law.” These are bail hearings for the 600 people charged so far. Defendants are apparently being arraigned in groups of three in some courts, an indication of the strain caused by these extraordinary circumstances. There will be little respite in the coming days. As I understand it, the overwhelming majority of applicants have been denied bail and will remain in custody until their case is brought before a crown court, where judges are able to send down sterner punishments. The expectation is that the vast majority of those found guilty will receive custodial sentences.

Process is in motion, but the politics of this affair is not spent yet. The reputation of the police, already shaken by the phone hacking saga, has been further damaged by accusations of incompetence and cowardice. Public anger with the boys in blue was palpable on last night’s bumper edition of Question Time. However unfair all this may be on what was a very thin blue line in some affected areas, it has created an acrimonious political atmosphere. In her statement to the House yesterday, Theresa May claimed that the government had ordered police chiefs to take tougher action. This morning Sir Hugh Orde, chairman of ACPO, has rejected her version of events: police chiefs ordered the change in tactics.

There is layer upon layer of political antipathy on show here. Orde is a serial critic of this government, and specifically its decision to replace police authorities with independent elected police commissioners. Cuts to the police budget and the wrangle over the effects of this on frontline policing provide another context for disaffection. Then there is the fetid hangover from the phone hacking saga; Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates both fired incendiary parting shots at the government over the handling of the saga and police reform in general. Finally, the government is apparently determined to appoint an outsider to run the Met and advise the police on broader issues, which is scarcely a vote of confidence in the status quo. The riots are merely the latest front for confrontation between politicians and police.