The raid on Westminster

11 December 2008What possessed senior police officers to raid the offices of a member of parliament without a warrant, asks BRIAN COSTAR in London, writing on our partner website, Inside Story



THEIR LORDSHIPS and Honourable Members were pleased last week to host the Queen at the Palace of Westminster, where she dutifully delivered the Speech from the Throne to open the new session of parliament. Many of them were decidedly less pleased a week earlier to learn that members of the Metropolitan Police had also paid a visit to parliament, where they arrested the Tory frontbencher Damian Green and searched his parliamentary office, his constituency headquarters and his private residence.

The police did so on suspicion that he was in receipt of documents leaked from the immigration department by a relatively junior public servant. His arrest was not made under the Official Secrets Act but on a common law charge of “aiding and abetting misconduct in public office” and “conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office.” The phrases may be redolent of Orwell’s 1984 but the offences carry a decidedly unfictional maximum sentence of life imprisonment...

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Photo: Alina Hart/ iStockphoto.com

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