Using national security as a cover

Not for the first time, the government has been caught out using national security as a cover for its own embarrassment. This is the worst kind of crying wolf and seriously damages the government's credibility.

According to the Guardian, the report by British Transport Police Chief Contstable Ian Johnston into the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green in connection with leaks from a civil servant "concludes that none of the 31 leaks raised a threat to national security", which is what the Cabinet Office told the police.

Now that's what I call grooming

The Times has an interview with Christopher Galley, the civil servant who leaked information to Damian Green. Galley says that the Tories have dumped him after promising to look after him. The Tories clearly want to avoid any suggestion that they groomed or bribed Galley but he clearly was groomed.

He had read an article on immigration posted by Mr Davis on the Conservative Party website and left a message on the site agreeing with the article and making a few suggestions. To his amazement, he received an e-mail asking him to meet the Shadow Home Secretary. “The invitation was to Davis’s Commons office,” said Mr Galley, who was then aged 24 and in the lowest rank of the Civil Service.
...
“In the invitation it said, ‘Our immigration spokesman wants to be there as well’,” Mr Galley went on. “At the time I didn’t have a clue who he was. So this balding bloke turns up at the meeting. It was Damian Green.

Galley also tells what first led him to leak:

“One day, I was sitting in Vernon [Coaker]'s office and . . . a private secretary to Vernon and one of the assistant private secretaries were dealing with a matter relating to the Security Industry Authority [which licenses workers in the security industry],” he said. “They were looking at this document to do with how licences had been granted to asylum seekers to work in the SIA. But rather than trying to put a stop to that, these two people were actually trying to co-ordinate . . . a damage limitation exercise on how to keep it quiet, which I didn’t think was right.

National security indeed!

Damian Green's intervention following this afternoon's statement by Commons speaker Michael Martin should shoot the national security fox once and for all.

"An MP endangering national security would be a disgrace. An MP exposing embarrassing facts about Home Office policy which ministers are hiding is doing a job in the public interest."

In a blog for Index on Censorship, one time Foreign Office mole Derek Pasquill points out the similarities and differences between his case and that of Green, although Pasquill's position is more like that of civil servant Christopher Galley. In either case you wonder whether it's really a matter for a criminal investigation.

Out comes the national security card

The Guardian says that the police claim that national security issues led to the arrest of Damian Green overshadows the release of a tory film of the search of his office. It could not have been more blatant that the security card was being played had they said "trumped" instead of overshadowed.

The first three lines of the Guardian article say it all:

The Metropolitan police conducted a search of Damian Green's parliamentary office last week after being told by the Cabinet Office that a series of leaks to the shadow minister could have posed a threat to national security.

Minutes after the Tories intensified the pressure on the police last night by releasing a short video showing the "rigorous" search, the Met hit back by highlighting the seriousness of the operation.

Sources said their investigation was prompted by a request from the Cabinet Office, whose officials told the police that the "systematic series of leaks" from the private office of the home secretary were so serious that they could pose a threat to national security. Police sources said this explained their decision to take the step - unprecedented in recent history - of arresting Green and searching his parliamentary office.

The police sources certainly know how to get their version of events in the paper without direct attribution or comeback.

When you dig into the national security claim, as subsequently set out in a letter from Jacqui Smith, it's fairly clear there is nothing in it:

She wrote: "Given the sensitive issues that the Home Office deals with - including matters of national security - there was a clear duty to take action to prevent leaks from happening."

BBC in analysis - shock

The Tories are clearly winning the Damian Green row, lately because of an email that was not so much leaked as sent to them by mistake. Despite the government claiming that there was no attempt at a stitch-up over the forthcoming statement from the Speaker , the facts are against them. According to the BBC:

a spokesman for Ms Harman said the meeting had "nothing to do with the contents" of the statement.

"The content of the Speaker's statement is entirely a matter for the speaker," he said.

"The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the parliamentary business and handling of issues that arise from the fact that the Speaker's statement and the Queen's Speech will be happening on the same day."

However, BBC political correspondent Reeta Chakrabarti said: "Harriet Harman details in the e-mail several principles she sees as vital, including that MPs must be able to do their work and that they are not above the law; matters that would appear to be central to the issues the speaker must discuss."

How very unlike the BBC to give the public the facts that show that one side is right and the other wrong in an ongoing political argument. BBC "balance" usually involves making both sides look equally valid.

Secrecy office

Linking the cabinet minutes and the Damian Green case is the involvement of the Cabinet Office, who obviously see it as their main job to stop information that will damage the government getting into the public domain.

Meanwhile, Douglas Carswell MP blames Commons speaker Michael Martin for allowing Green's office to be searched and says he will call for him to go.

Daft and stupid

I'm pretty gobsmacked by the arrest of Damian Green for using leaked information. On Comment is Free, David Hencke says that "whistleblowing happens every week and any government that thinks it can stop it is daft and stupid".

What he was actually doing, as any good investigative journalist would know, is obtaining information that the government had suppressed of an extremely embarrassing nature that ministers would rather not see published.

And indeed, journalists are also at risk under the same law.