David Davis discusses Plebgate affair across the Newspapers

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As published in the Daily Mail:
Plebgate police say sorry… but not to Mitchell

Three police officers were last night accused of using weasel words’ after they denied lying to help bring down former Cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell.

Inspector Ken MacKaill, Detective Sergeant Stuart Hinton and Sergeant Chris Jones yesterday issued a partial apology for their conduct following a meeting with Mr Mitchell at the height of the Plebgate’ row last year.

But they pointedly did not apologise to the former Government chief whip himself. Friends of Mr Mitchell said their statement did not go far enough and called for them to face disciplinary proceedings.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis said: After bringing down a Cabinet minister, a half-apology won’t do. These people are guilty of a serious misconduct.’

Mr Mitchell admits losing his temper and swearing after police guarding the gates of Downing Street stopped him riding his bicycle through the gates on a September evening last year. But he has always denied using the toxic word plebs’, as claimed in a police log’ leaked to the media.

A secret recording made by Mr Mitchell of the meeting with the three officers in his Sutton Coldfield constituency last October reveals them apparently accepting his account of the incident.

But just minutes later the three, all senior members of the Police Federation, told reporters that he had failed to explain what had happened and called for him to resign.

The three men were controversially cleared of misconduct last week following an internal investigation by West Mercia Police.

But, in an extraordinary intervention, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said the investigation was wrong to clear them.

In a statement yesterday the three officers apologised for talking to the media, but denied lying. The reputation of, and public confidence in, the police service is of immense concern to each of us,’ they said.

We acknowledge the investigation’s criticism relating to our poor judgment in talking to the media following the meeting with Andrew Mitchell, for which we take this opportunity to apologise. We would like to emphasise that in no way did any of us ever plan or intend to mislead anyone about what occurred during this meeting or otherwise.’

But friends of Mr Mitchell dismissed the statement. Mr Davis said: The transcript of the meeting shows that the federation deployed a premeditated line of attack against Mr Mitchell. This is not a case of misjudgment, it is deliberate misconduct and they should face the consequences of that misconduct.’

Fellow Tory MP Dominic Raab said: These weasel words are no substitute for proper accountability of sworn officers for what the IPCC deemed a deliberate lie intended to bring down an elected Cabinet minister in pursuit of a political agenda.’

Tomorrow, the chief constables of the West Mercia, West Midlands and Warwickshire forces, which employ the three officers, will be grilled by MPs on the Commons home affairs committee.

David Shaw, chief constable of the West Mercia force, will be pressed on revelations from the IPCC that the internal inquiry’s conclusions were changed at the eleventh hour to clear the three.

As published in The Guardian:
Police officers sorry for ‘poor judgment’ over Andrew Mitchell meeting

Three Police Federation officers acknowledge IPCC criticism of their handling of meeting with then chief whip about pleb row.

Three police officers involved in the Plebgate saga have issued a limited apology, saying they showed “poor judgment in talking to the media” after a meeting with Andrew Mitchell as he battled for his political life.

Mitchell resigned from his cabinet post as chief whip, but while he fought to stay in office last year he met three Police Federation representatives who later told the media he had failed to detail what happened during his Downing Street clash with police.

Last week the IPCC said a recording Mitchell made of the meeting proved he had in fact been candid with the officers and admitted swearing at PCs who stopped him pushing his bike through the Downing Street gates, but denied using the word pleb.

The three officers were accused of trying to damage Mitchell by giving a misleading account, and police were criticised after it was decided that none of the officers should face disciplinary action.

The IPCC said there were issues of “honesty and integrity” over the media statements, with police accused of trying to discredit Mitchell as part of their campaign against government cuts to police funding and reductions in the wages and conditions of some officers.

On Monday the Police Federation issued a statement on behalf of the three officers – Inspector Ken MacKaill of West Mercia police, Detective Sergeant Stuart Hinton of Warwickshire police and Sergeant Chris Jones of West Midlands police, in which they said: “We acknowledge the investigation’s criticism relating to our poor judgment in talking to the media following the meeting with Andrew Mitchell, for which we take this opportunity to apologise.

“We would like to emphasise (as we did to the investigation) that in no way did any of us ever plan or intend to mislead anyone about what occurred during this meeting or otherwise.”

Last week the IPCC said it disagreed with a decision made by the officers’ forces that there was no case to answer for misconduct or gross misconduct.

Mitchell was forced to resign as chief whip in October 2012 after an official police log claimed he had described officers as “fucking plebs” when they declined to allow him to wheel his bike through the Downing Street security gates. Accounts from the police were leaked to two newspapers. But then CCTV emerged that appeared to contradict key claims in the police accounts. Mitchell denied calling them plebs.

This month prosecutors said they had received all the evidence they need to assess whether Metropolitan police officers allegedly involved in the original meeting and leaking the logs to media outlets should face charges.

The Tory MP David Davis said on Monday: “The statement from the three police Federation officials is simply not good enough. Their actions have destroyed a career. The transcript of the meeting which took place in Sutton Coldfield shows that the federation deployed a premeditated line of attack against Mr Mitchell.

“This is not a case of misjudgment, it is deliberate misconduct and they should face the consequences of that misconduct.”

As published in The Daily Telegraph:
Apology by Plebgate officers ‘does not go far enough’

Supporters of Andrew Mitchell last night rejected a partial apology by three police officers at the centre of the plebgate row who had issued a statement admitting they had shown “poor judgment”.

Insp Ken MacKaill, Det Sgt Stuart Hinton and Sgt Chris Jones, of the Police Federation, were accused of misrepresenting the former chief whip after a meeting in his constituency last October at which he set out his side of the Downing Street row.

An investigation by the West Mercia force into the affair concluded that the men should face no further action.

But a damning report published by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) last week concluded that there were issues of “honesty and integrity”. It recommended they face disciplinary proceedings.

Last night, two days before their chief constables are due before the Commons home affairs committee to answer questions about the matter, the three issued a partial apology. In a joint statement they said: “The reputation of, and public confidence in, the police service is of immense concern to each of us.

“We acknowledge the investigation’s criticism relating to our poor judgment in talking to the media following the meeting with Andrew Mitchell, for which we take this opportunity to apologise.

“We would like to emphasise – as we did to the investigation – that in no way did any of us ever plan or intend to mislead anyone about what occurred during this meeting or otherwise.”

But supporters of Mr Mitchell said the apology did not go far enough. David Davis, the Tory MP, who has backed his colleague throughout the scandal, said: “The statement from the three Police Federation officials is not good enough. Their actions have destroyed a career.

“The transcript of the meeting which took place in Sutton Coldfield shows that the federation deployed a premeditated line of attack against Mr Mitchell.

“This is not a case of misjudgment, it is deliberate misconduct and they should face the consequences of that misconduct.”

Mr Mitchell agreed to meet Police Federation representatives from his local area after the “plebgate” affair in which he was accused of branding members of Downing Street’s diplomatic protection group “plebs” and “morons”.

It was alleged he responded angrily after the officers refused to open the main gates in Downing Street to allow him to cycle through.

While admitting swearing, Mr Mitchell denied using the word plebs.

In a meeting with the three federation representatives last October Mr Mitchell explained what he claimed he had said and again apologised.

But when the men left the meeting they claimed Mr Mitchell refused to provide an account of the argument.

An investigation was opened when Mr Mitchell provided a tape of the conversation.

Last week David Cameron and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said they believed Mr Mitchell was owed an apology. The Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether to bring criminal charges against eight people arrested after the scandal as part of Scotland Yard’s investigation, known as Operation Alice.

As published in The Guardian:
Theresa May rebukes police over reaction to Plebgate
Home secretary calls on chief constable to apologise to Andrew Mitchell and challenges decision not to discipline officers. The plebgate affair escalated on Tuesday when Theresa May challenged a chief constable’s decision not to take disciplinary action against police who allegedly gave misleading accounts of a meeting with Andrew Mitchell last year.

In a boost to the former chief whip, who is fighting claims that he called police officers who were guarding Downing Street “fucking plebs”, the home secretary called on West Mercia’s chief constable to apologise to Mitchell, saying that the conduct of officers at the meeting struck at the issue of trust in the service.

May made the comments after the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) challenged a police account of a meeting between Mitchell and the Police Federation in his Sutton Coldfield constituency on 12 October 2012.

Representatives of West Mercia, West Midlands and Warwickshire police met Mitchell after the federation told him it wanted to “clear the air” after the confrontation when police declined to allow him to wheel his bike through Downing Street’s gates on 19 September 2012.

Mitchell admitted in the meeting, dubbed by one friend “Kafkaesque” and a “brutal” display of police power, of having sworn in the presence of the officers but insisted he did not call them plebs.

Ken MacKaill, the main spokesman for the three officers, who did not speak during the meeting, asked Mitchell to resign after the talks. Mackaill said: “He is continuing to refuse to elaborate on what happened. I think his position is untenable.”

But the IPCC said that a record of the meeting by Mitchell showed that he had used it to outline his central defence – that he had sworn in the presence of the officers but insisted that he had not used the word pleb. In the report Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC, said of the officers at the Sutton Coldfield meeting: “Their motive seems plain: as the West Mercia investigating officer noted, ‘they were running a successful, high-profile, anti-cuts media campaign and the account that he provided to them did not fit with their agenda’.”

The remarks prompted the home secretary to issue a rare rebuke after the chief constable of West Mercia, David Shaw, concluded that there was no reason to discipline the police. Appearing at the Commons home affairs select committee, May said: “The police need the trust of the public. These sorts of incident will strike at the heart of that issue of trust. For many members of the public, they will actually say, well, here was somebody who was a member of parliament, who had been a Cabinet minister, and yet this has happened for that individual, and what chance is there for a member of the public?”

Asked if the chief constable of West Mercia, the force that ran the investigation into the officers, should apologise to Mitchell, she said: “I think that would be appropriate.”

May added that it was “quite wrong” that the three officers were not to face disciplinary hearings. “If it is indeed the case that warranted police officers behaved in the way Deborah Glass has described, that’s not acceptable at all.”Keith Vaz, chairman of the select committee, announced that he would summon Shaw, the Police Federation chairman, Steve Williams, and Glass.

Glass had directly challenged the West Mercia chief constable when she wrote: “I disagree with the conclusions of the investigating officer and the opinion of the appropriate authorities that there is no case to answer. In my view, the evidence is such that a panel should determine whether the three officers gave a false account of the meeting in a deliberate attempt to support their MPS colleague and discredit Mr Mitchell, in pursuit of a wider agenda.

“In my opinion the evidence and the surrounding circumstances do give an indication of an issue of honesty and integrity and/or discreditable conduct, not merely naïve or poor professional judgment.”

Mitchell, who has been waiting more than a year for the outcome of the investigations into police officers over claims that they leaked information and conspired against him, said: “It is a matter of deep concern that the police forces employing these officers have concluded that their conduct has not brought the police service into disrepute. Most people will disagree.

“It is a decision which will undermine confidence in the ability of the police to investigate misconduct when the reputation of the police service as a whole is at stake.

“My family and I have waited nearly a year for these police officers to be held to account and for an apology from the police forces involved. It seems we have waited in vain.”

The Police Federation accused the IPCC of acting as judge and jury, prompting David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who is Mitchell’s closest ally, to say: “The police seem not to understand that is the law. Obeying the law and enforcing the law happens to be their job.”

A joint statement from the chief constables of Warwickshire, West Mercia and West Midlands forces said: “Andrew Mitchell MP has never made a complaint to police. West Mercia, with the support of West Midlands and Warwickshire police, recognising the public interest in this case, independently decided to investigate this incident and made a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.”

The skirmish was the opening act to the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service on eight individuals – including five police officers – accused of leaking to the media, misconduct and being part of a conspiracy to discredit Mitchell.

One friend of Mitchell accused the police of having acted in a heavy-handed way in the disputed meeting. The transcript shows that Mitchell repeated his apology to the officer in Downing Street, admitted that he swore but then insisted that he had not used the word pleb.The officers at the meeting repeatedly asked him whether he was calling the officer on duty a liar after a report of the duty officer’s notes of the encounter alleged that Mitchell had called him a “fucking pleb”. Mitchell declined to call the officer a liar. This prompted the Warwickshire officer to say that he was required under his code of conduct to report the officer for issuing a false statement.

In her report Glass said: “Despite their apparent enthusiasm during the meeting for reporting their MPS colleague for lying, in fact none of the officers do so, but immediately tell the waiting media, in effect, that it is Mr Mitchell’s integrity which is in question.”

A friend of Mitchell said: “The meeting was Kafkaesque. It was utterly brutal.”

Davis told the Guardian: “What they said outside the meeting did not reflect what happened inside the meeting. At its mildest they misled the public. You have this issue of a pre-meditated lie.

“The people we are talking about here can arrest you, lock you up, charge you and give evidence against you in court. That is what they do as their profession. So for them to have a pre-meditated deception seems to me to be not just a misconduct but misconduct that is very material to their ability to do their jobs.”

As published in The Independent:
IPPC questions ‘honesty and integrity’ of police officers who met the former Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell over ‘Plebgate’ affair;
Watchdog says that there should be a panel to determine whether three police officers gave a false account of meeting.

A misconduct panel should decide if three police officers gave a false account of a meeting with former Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell to discredit him, the police watchdog has said.
But the deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), Deborah Glass, said that as Mr Mitchell has chosen not to make a formal complaint, she is powerless to direct misconduct proceedings.
Her findings are in direct conflict with the result of an investigation by West Mercia Police that concluded the Police Federation representatives from West Mercia, West Midlands and Warwickshire forces had no case to answer for misconduct or gross misconduct.
The three officers were accused of deliberately misrepresenting what Mr Mitchell said during a meeting in his Sutton Coldfield constituency office on October 12 last year when they gave interviews immediately afterwards.
Mr Mitchell said today he hopes there will be “considerable public concern” that three Police Federation representatives accused of trying to discredit him will face “no disciplinary consequences for their behaviour” after the police watchdog published its findings on the incident.
Mr Mitchell met the Police Federation representatives after he was accused of calling officers guarding Downing Street “plebs” in a foul-mouthed rant as he was asked to cycle through the main gates on September 19 last year.
The former Tory chief whip insisted he did not use the words attributed to him, and later said he was the victim of a deliberate attempt to “toxify” the Tories and ruin his career.
Ms Glass said West Mercia Police found that although the Police Federation contributed to the pressure on Mr Mitchell and his decision to resign, none of the officers had a case to answer for misconduct or gross misconduct.
She said: “The investigating officer concluded that while the federation representatives’ comments to the media could be viewed as ambiguous or misleading, there was no deliberate intention to lie. I disagree.
“In my view, the evidence is such that a panel should determine whether the three officers gave a false account of the meeting in a deliberate attempt to support their Metropolitan Police colleague and discredit Mr Mitchell, in pursuit of a wider agenda.
“In my opinion, the evidence indicates an issue of honesty and integrity, not merely naive or poor professional judgment.”
“In the media and political climate of the day, I do not consider that the officers could have been in any doubt about the impact of their public statements on the pressure being brought on Mr Mitchell.
“As police officers, they had a responsibility to present a fair and accurate picture. Their motive seems plain: they were running a successful, high-profile, anti-cuts campaign and the account that he provided to them did not fit with their agenda.”
Ms Glass said the federation representatives must have known Mr Mitchell was under pressure to resign his post as chief whip following scenes at the Conservative Party conference at which Federation members were seen wearing ‘PC Pleb’ T-shirts.
She said: “It was clear that the parties had very different agendas for the meeting.
“Mr Mitchell saw it as an attempt to clear the air, while the officers focused on Mr Mitchell’s ‘version of events’ – that is what happened in the Downing Street incident on September 19 when Mr Mitchell was alleged to have called police officers ‘f****** plebs’.”
Tory former shadow Home Secretary David Davis – a close ally of Mr Mitchell – said continued denials of misconduct were “astonishing” and raised serious questions about whether police forces should continue to be allowed to investigate their own officers.
“These are officers who can arrest you and me, they can charge you and me, they can turn up in court and give evidence against you and me and yet, when they go in for a premeditated dishonest action like this, their own police force does not think that’s misconduct,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One.
“People will start to think: can we allow police forces to investigate their own misdemeanours in future because, frankly, they don’t appear to be able to understand when something a police officer does seriously undermines his ability to do his job.”
The MP said he hoped the CPS would come to a decision “in the next week or two” about whether to bring criminal charges.
“The public at large, I think, feel that Andrew Mitchell has suffered a major injustice and I agree with them,” he said.

As Published in The Guardian:
Decision soon on charges in Plebgate case, Starmer says: CPS has all the details it needs, says prosecutor: Police source says former chief whip ‘stitched up’
Britain’s most senior prosecutor yesterday said he understood concerns about the time it has taken to investigate police officers over the Plebgate saga, which cost Andrew Mitchell his cabinet post.
Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, confirmed that the Crown Prosecution Service now had all the information it needed and would decide whether officers would be charged as soon as possible. Mitchell was forced to resign as chief whip last year after officers said he called them “fucking plebs” after they refused to allow him to wheel his bike through the Downing Street main gate on 19 September 2012. He has always denied calling the police plebs.
Friends of Mitchell have criticised the length of the investigation by the Metropolitan police’s directorate of professional standards, which took more than a year to complete. Eight people, including a Met police officer, have been arrested.
Starmer was challenged on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on the length of the investigation. “I understand why there is a concern about the delay,” he said, adding: “I’m not responsible for the length of the investigation. The file arrived with the CPS a week ago Friday, so I don’t think at the moment the CPS can be accused of delay. We have got people working on it and we will come to a proper decision just as soon as we can.”
Starmer hinted that a decision would be made soon. “I don’t want to give predictions. We have got what we want, we are hard at it. And we will come to a decision as quickly as we can.”
Starmer’s comments came after a police source claimed Mitchell was “stitched up” by the police. A senior officer quoted by the Sunday Times said evidence against Mitchell was doctored by officers annoyed at his insistence on wheeling his bike through the main gate a day before he is alleged to have verbally abused the police.
According to the newspaper, in a witness statement given to David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, the officer said: “On the 18 September 2012 Mitchell had also insisted on being let out through the main gate. Following this (officer X) said to the other officers: ‘Right, we can stitch him up.'”
The whistleblower then reportedly went on to state that the word “plebs” was added by the named officer to the original police log of the conversation. The officer also claims that bogus emails were sent by one of the officers involved in the row with Mitchell in which he posed as a member of public who claimed to have overheard Mitchell use the phrase “fucking plebs”.
Davis has written to Starmer demanding that the allegation be investigated.
The Met said: “Many lines of inquiry have been investigated and the final file is now with the CPS, who are considering all the evidence.”
In his BBC interview, Starmer also defended the Human Rights Act, following suggestions from Conservative ministers that it should be replaced.

As published in the Daily Mail:
Force Altered report that cleared officers- watchdog

A police force has been accused of an extraordinary 11th-hour cover-up over claims three senior officers lied to blacken the name of former Cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell.

In an explosive letter, watchdog Deborah Glass said an internal investigation by West Mercia Police was altered at the last minute to clear them of misconduct.

On Tuesday, the Independent Police Complaints Commission suggested officers lied about what Mr Mitchell said in a private meeting about the Plebgate’ row.

It said they wanted to heap pressure on him to resign over disputed claims he called Downing Street police officers plebs’ during an argument at the No10 gates.

And it concluded that the trio – Inspector Ken MacKaill, Detective Sergeant Stuart Hinton and Sergeant Chris Jones – should have faced misconduct hearings.

IPCC deputy chairman Miss Glass last night revealed that the first draft of an earlier West Mercia inquiry drew the same conclusion. But within a month, the force changed its mind. In a letter copied to the Home Secretary, Miss Glass said: We had no concerns about the quality of the investigation carried out by West Mercia Police. It was the conclusion we disagreed with.

In that regard, I note that in the first draft report submitted to the IPCC in July the senior investigating officer did in fact conclude there was a case to answer for misconduct. Although the final report in August, did not.’

It is not clear who ordered the report to be changed or why. West Mercia Police declined to comment last night.

But one senior Tory said its Chief Constable David Shaw would have to consider his position’ if it emerged he had been involved in the decision.

The Prime Minister told MPs yesterday that the conduct of the officers, who were representing the Police Federation, was not acceptable’ and backed calls for Mr Shaw to apologise to Mr Mitchell. Mr Cameron said it was only thanks to a recording of the meeting by Mr Mitchell that he was able to show that what the police officers said was untrue.’

Inspector MacKaill is from the West Mercia force, DS Hinton is from West Midlands and Sgt Jones is from Warwickshire.

Mr Shaw, along with the chief constables of the West Midlands and Warwickshire forces, will be grilled by MPs over the issue next week. Tory MP Richard Ottaway said all three might have to resign if they were found to have been involved in a cover-up.

He said: [Mr Shaw] has to explain exactly what has happened. If it is apparent that he has been part of the change in the [report’s] conclusions then frankly I think he has got to consider his position. If [the other chief constables] were part of it as well then they are in the same position.’

The investigation by West Mercia concluded there were no grounds for a misconduct inquiry as there was no deliberate intention to lie’.

But Miss Glass branded the investigation a whitewash, and warned the incident raised questions about the honesty and integrity’ of the three officers involved.

Her intervention drew an angry response from the Police Federation and the three forces.

West Midlands police and crime commissioner Bob Jones yesterday said her comments had been completely unjustified’ and very inappropriate’, and called for the abolition of the IPCC.

The former shadow home secretary David Davis said: What the IPCC did here was trust the police, as the public do generally, and unfortunately what this demonstrates is that the police cannot be trusted, actually, to investigate themselves.

I’m afraid it is as plain as a pikestaff that what is happening here is the senior officers are trying to prevent their own forces from embarrassment… an attempt to stop embarrassment I’m afraid is a disgrace.’

The Crown Prosecution Service is now considering whether to bring criminal charges following a long-running police investigation into the original Plebgate’ incident in September last year.

Mr Mitchell admits losing his temper and swearing after police stopped him riding his bicycle through the gates of Downing Street. But he has always denied using the word plebs’, as claimed in a police log’ which was leaked to the media.

Eight people, including five police officers from the Diplomatic Protection Group, were arrested.

As published in the London Evening Standard:
Police ’embroidered truth in Plebgate to claim Tory scalp’

Former Home Secretary Jack Straw today claimed that police officers had “embroidered the truth” over the Plebgate affair in an attempt to “get the scalp of a Conservative cabinet minister”.

Mr Straw attacked their behaviour as “completely inappropriate” and said it revealed a “poverty of leadership” at the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers. His attack came the day after Home Secretary Theresa May called for the officers to face disciplinary action over an alleged attempt to smear former Tory Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell.

Senior Conservative MP David Davis said it was another case, along with Hilsborough and the death of Jean-Charles de Menezes, in which there were concerns over police “telling the truth”. Another Tory MP called for Mr Mitchell to be restored to the Cabinet saying he had been unjustly pushed out in the wake of Plebgate last year.

Speaking on BBC radio, Labour MP Mr Straw said: “[Officers had] the idea that if they embroidered the truth – and I put that mildly – then they could get the scalp of a Conservative cabinet minister.”

He added: “What this shows is a poverty of leadership by the federation and a readiness by them to resort to completely inappropriate behaviour, which you would not expect of anybody, but least of all of police officers.”

In September last year Mr Mitchell was accused of calling Met officers “f***ing plebs” after they refused to open a Downing Street gate for him.

He denied using the word but agreed to meet three representatives of the Police Federation. The officers gave media interviews in which it was claimed they misrepresented what Mr Mitchell had told them.

West Mercia Police carried out an internal inquiry which found the three had no case to answer, a verdict it stands by. But the IPCC, the police watchdog, disagreed yesterday, questioning the officers “honesty and integrity” and saying there was evidence of a deliberate attempt to smear Mr Mitchell. It came at a time when the Government was at loggerheads with the federation over police budget cuts.

The Crown Prosecution Service is now considering whether to bring charges after a long running investigation into the original plebgate incident.

As posted in the Financial Times:
Pressure mounts for overhaul of UK police regulation

Pressure is building on the government to overhaul the way the police service is regulated in the wake of the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate” affair, with the former policing minister the latest to call for radical action.

Nick Herbert, the Conservative police minister until last year, added his voice to calls to radically change the Independent Police Complaints Commission, or even to scrap it altogether.

Mr Herbert told the Financial Times: “I think the time has come to look again at the system of police regulation. Either the IPCC should investigate or it should not – the current system of ‘supervised complaints’ is neither fish nor fowl.”

Mr Herbert, who oversaw the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners, said the system of police investigating themselves while supervised by the IPCC did not work.

The Tory MP is the latest to criticise the oversight system, which saw the IPCC issue a highly critical report into three senior police officers on Tuesday but not take any further action.

The report focused on a meeting between Andrew Mitchell and senior officers from three forces soon after Mr Mitchell, the former chief whip, was accused of having insulted a Downing Street policeman by calling him a “pleb”.

The three officers at the meeting told the media afterwards that Mr Mitchell had not provided a full account of the altercation at the gates outside Number 10, but the secretly recorded conservation showed afterwards that he had gone into detail about what happened.

The incident is the latest allegation of wrongdoing against officers over the “plebgate” affair.

Eight others have been arrested after it emerged that witness testimony from the incident was written by a policeman who was not there.

It is also another blow to public trust in the police service, which has recently been accused of covering up its role in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, failing to investigate phone hacking and ignoring allegations of child abuse by Jimmy Savile.

Damian Green, the current police minister, told the College of Police on Wednesday: “[Corruption and misconduct] can have a corrosive effect on the reputation of all police officers, undermines justice and fundamentally strikes at the heart of public confidence in the police.”

The run of scandals to hit the service has renewed interest in fundamental reform of the police, especially of the way it is overseen.

Sir Hugh Orde, the head of the Association of Police Officers, on Wednesday became the highest ranking member of the service to call for an end to self-regulation.

He told the BBC: “[We need] a completely independent police investigation system – I think that is critical.”

So far, ministers have argued that the solution to police regulation is to expand the IPCC rather than dismantle it. Theresa May, the home secretary, announced in February she would give the body more resources and allow it to compel officers to attend interviews.

But others say a more fundamental change is needed. Labour has argued for the IPCC to be replaced by a Police Standards Authority that could launch its own investigations, hold public hearings and impose sanctions.

Mr Mitchell and his supporters, however, warn the focus on the role of the regulator could detract from attention on what was done by individual officers. David Davis, a close ally of Mr Mitchell, said on Wednesday: “The police are trying to mob the referee, to take away from the very serious nature of the allegations.”

As published in The Guardian:
Comment is free: In brief: Plebgate’s greatest revelation? So many of us believed the police

Now and again a seemingly trivial episode serves to illuminate a much larger political or social problem. It can also conveniently act as a litmus test, demonstrating how far people are capable of objective judgment, or are swayed by prejudice.

On the evening of 19 September last year, Andrew Mitchell, the Tory chief whip at the time, wanted to push his bike through the gates of Downing Street. The policemen at the gate said he couldn’t, and a short altercation ensued, with Mitchell saying: “I thought you guys were fucking meant to help us.” That might have been the end of the matter, maybe with private apologies – from Mitchell for swearing at the police, and from the constabulary for behaving in such an officious way.

What happened instead was that the Sun ran a story saying that Mitchell had called the policemen “fucking plebs”, a word taken up by Ed Miliband, shouting “plebs” across the Commons, as well as newspapers. Mitchell arranged a meeting with the Police Federation to clear the air, but the policemen he met then quoted him in a way plainly designed to damage him and force him to resign, which he did. But Mitchell had tape-recorded the meeting and, after far too long, Deborah Glass of the Independent Police Complaints Commission has just concluded that the policemen’s distorted version of that meeting raised an “issue of honesty and integrity, not merely naive or poor professional judgment”.

That still doesn’t address the original incident, the truth about which was revealed earlier this year – not by an official inquiry but by Channel 4 News. Using CCTV footage it showed that the police account simply could not be true. In particular a description supposedly from the police log, and also leaked to the press, was demonstrably false. An inquiry by the Metropolitan Police into the incident still hasn’t finished.

What’s hard to get over is not the revelation that our police can be corrupt and mendacious – what else is new? – but that they can be quite so reckless, and that so many people are so credulous. It was quite plausible to suppose that Mitchell should have sworn at the police. What was unlikely to the point of absurdity was that he would have called them “plebs”. It’s as if the police had quoted him saying, “Zounds and curses upon thy head, thou varlet.”

One might have thought that the police would have been a little more cautious about colluding with the Sun just at a time when the phone-hacking story had shown the extent of the corrupt relationship between the Met and the Murdoch press, but no. Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun’s political editor, appeared in a T-shirt that said “I’m a pleb”. No, you’re an Old Etonian, and you work for the paper that published even more wicked lies from the police about the Hillsborough disaster.

There are too few heroes in this dismal story: certainly not David Cameron, who abandoned his colleague; nor Miliband, who should now apologise to Mitchell.

On the right, the libertarian Tory David Davis deserves a campaign medal, but so does Chris Mullin on the left. Apart from saying that, from his long experience of working with unions and cases of injustice, the Police Federation is the only union he knows that will defend a member even if he has obviously lied and broken the law, the former Labour MP makes the crucial point: if the police can do this to a cabinet minister, what will they do to a frightened black boy on a working-class street – or to any of us?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Strange Death of Tory England.

As published in The Guardian:
May rebukes police over reaction to Plebgate: ‘Quite wrong’ if officers avoid disciplinary hearing: Mitchell boosted by call for apology from force.

The plebgate affair escalated yesterday when Theresa May challenged a chief constable’s decision not to take disciplinary action against police who allegedly gave misleading accounts of a meeting with Andrew Mitchell last year.

In a boost to the former chief whip, who is fighting claims that he called police officers who were guarding Downing Street “fucking plebs”, the home secretary called on West Mercia’s chief constable to apologise to Mitchell, saying that the conduct of officers at the meeting struck at the issue of trust in the service.

May made the comments after the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) challenged a police account of a meeting between Mitchell and the Police Federation in his Sutton Coldfield constituency on 12 October 2012.

Representatives of West Mercia, West Midlands and Warwickshire police met Mitchell after the federation told him it wanted to “clear the air” after the confrontation when police declined to allow him to wheel his bike through Downing Street’s gates on 19 September 2012.

Mitchell admitted in the meeting, dubbed by one friend “Kafkaesque” and a “brutal” display of police power, of having sworn in the presence of the officers but insisted he did not call them plebs.

Ken MacKaill, the main spokesman for the three officers, who did not speak during the meeting, asked Mitchell to resign after the talks. Mackaill said: “He is continuing to refuse to elaborate on what happened. I think his position is untenable.”

But the IPCC said that a record of the meeting by Mitchell showed that he had used it to outline his central defence – that he had sworn in the presence of the officers but insisted that he had not used the word pleb. In the report Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC, said of the officers at the Sutton Coldfield meeting: “Their motive seems plain: as the West Mercia investigating officer noted, ‘they were running a successful, high-profile, anti-cuts media campaign and the account that he provided to them did not fit with their agenda’.”

The remarks prompted the home secretary to issue a rare rebuke after the chief constable of West Mercia, David Shaw, concluded that there was no reason to discipline the police. Appearing at the Commons home affairs select committee, May said: “The police need the trust of the public. These sorts of incident will strike at the heart of that issue of trust.” Asked if the chief constable of West Mercia, the force that ran the investigation into the officers, should apologise to Mitchell, she said: “I think that would be appropriate.”

May added that it was “quite wrong” that the three officers were not to face disciplinary hearings. Keith Vaz, chairman of the select committee, announced that he would summon Shaw, the Police Federation chairman, Steve Williams, and Glass.

Mitchell, who has been waiting more than a year for the outcome of the investigations into police officers over claims that they leaked information and conspired against him, said: “It is a matter of deep concern that the police forces employing these officers have concluded that their conduct has not brought the police service into disrepute. Most people will disagree.”

The Police Federation accused the IPCC of acting as judge and jury, prompting David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who is Mitchell’s closest ally, to say: “The police seem not to understand that is the law. Obeying the law and enforcing the law happens to be their job.”

A joint statement from the chief constables of Warwickshire, West Mercia and West Midlands forces said: “Andrew Mitchell MP has never made a complaint to police. West Mercia, with the support of West Midlands and Warwickshire police, independently decided to investigate this incident and made a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.”

The skirmish was the opening act to the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service on eight individuals – including five police officers – accused of leaking to the media, misconduct and being part of a conspiracy to discredit Mitchell.

One friend of Mitchell accused the police of having acted in a heavy-handed way in the disputed meeting. The transcript shows that Mitchell repeated his apology to the officer in Downing Street, admitted that he swore but then insisted that he had not used the word pleb.