Although I don’t agree with her contention that Boris’s involvement in the sacking of Ian Blair was some sort of high water mark in the politicisation of policing, Jackie Ashley does write forcefully on Jacqui Smith this morning. Ashley idenitifies the key question hovering above the Home Secretary right now: is she lying about what she knew or just plain incompetent? Here’s the key passage:
“You can’t separate politics from policing, and you never have been able to: political judgments are so often behind what the police do. In this case, it is simply risible to push off the responsibility for the invasion of Green’s home and offices by anti-terrorist officers on to the police and nameless “officials”. If the home secretary did not know, she should have done. She knew there was a leak inquiry, that it was becoming a criminal investigation, and that one of her own officials had been arrested.
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