The Damian Green inquiry isn’t really about porn

From the beginning, there’s been a whiff of the police state about the treatment of Damian Green. Free societies do not allow detectives to burst into an MP’s office because he or she has been embarrassing the government.

That bad smell has risen to the level of a stench. The now ex-police officers, who claimed they had seen pornographic pictures on Green’s computer, raised the prospect, however fleetingly, of an authoritarian future. The police failed to find evidence that Green, then an opposition MP, had engaged in a ‘criminal conspiracy to solicit leaked information detrimental to national security’ when they raided Parliament in 2008.

Not that it bothered them. Because Green and his friends fought back hard, he had to be punished. Retired officers declared last week that Green must resign. If the pornographic images they claim to have found on his computer were illegal (and I should say Green denies their existence) the Met would have prosecuted him.