The toffs are revolting. Tory ex-minister David Mellor finds taxi-drivers intolerable, Labour MP Emily Thornberry is shocked by proletarian Anglophilia, and former chief whip Andrew Mitchell is driven to fury by a Downing Street cop. What is the matter with them?
Mitchell was the most reckless of all. He went to court and encountered the toff’s nemesis: a judge who dared imply that a policeman was too dim-witted to have lied. Few careers, and even fewer bank balances, have survived the royal courts of justice, especially in the matter of libel. Mitchell may face outrageous costs of £1.5m. No case so trivial should have gone so far; someone should have knocked heads together at the start.
Yet Mitchell deserves some sympathy. No one seems to remember the cause of his woes, the paranoid security that now rules London’s streets. Mitchell was angered at not being allowed to cycle through Downing Street’s gates, when they open at the nod of a chauffeur for ministerial limousines.
Mitchell lost his temper in a good cause. According to a “top secret” email – a contradiction in terms – the police ruled that for him to exit through the gates would “compromise security”, leading to “serious repercussions”. He had previously been allowed through, but that was in the higher cause of “avoiding embarrassment to … the diplomatic protection group”.
In other words, Downing Street security could be “compromised” to avoid embarrassing police officers, but not for the convenience of a cyclist; it could be compromised for a car, but not for a bike. Mitchell lost his rag when confronted by this sheer bureaucratic idiocy. A policeman was standing in the safest spot on earth, festooned with protective gear, pistols and machine guns, chatting with his mates and doing a job which could be done by any doorman, opening and closing a gate. When asked to do this by a mere cyclist he refused. It was not a case of a chief whip calling a policeman a pleb. It was a policeman treating a chief whip like a pleb.
Mitchell was part of the political establishment that has allowed the growth of this self-serving and extravagant security-industrial complex. He should now become its scourge. But he should also be the cyclist’s hero. He should be patron saint of cycle lanes, St Andrew of the open gates.
