Almost every detective, like almost every journalist, likes inside gossip. It is part of the attraction of both jobs: that ringside seat that allows police officers or reporters to inform friends and colleagues what the “real” story is, who’s lying, from what cloth the emperor’s new clothes are actually cut. No wonder the former detective, Neil Lewis, in the current heated atmosphere of sexually tinged accusation and hot denial, felt the need to share his own inside knowledge of Damian Green’s computer activity.
The reasons that prompted the original investigation into Green’s computer life do not reflect particularly well on either Green or the civil servant who leaked him Home Office information and was duly sacked for gross misconduct, as Alan Travis explained in the Guardian. But that still does not mean that everything uncovered in the subsequent police investigation, which Lewis suggests included the extensive use of pornography by Green, should necessarily now be used against him.
Back in 1973, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, encouraged his officers to be as open as possible to the media. In a famous memo, he announced that such an approach involved “risks, disappointments and anxieties” but he stressed that “officers who speak in good faith may be assured of my support, even if they make errors of judgment when deciding what information to disclose”. Lewis may well have felt that he was speaking in good faith as he was backing up his former superior, the former assistant commissioner Bob Quick, and challenging Green’s version of events. Lewis has duly received both support and condemnation from his former colleagues.
Just as, in our distant past, no man was a hero to his valet, not many public figures whose lives have been examined in detail by a detective will emerge from scrutiny as the sweet and cuddly souls they might see themselves to be. While covering crime for the Guardian, I met detectives with many amazing tales to tell but who felt that there was usually a line that could be drawn between behaviour that was illegal and should be exposed in the media, and behaviour that was just shabby. We would be horrified if a general practitioner felt impelled to announce that, say, a cabinet minister who pronounced on morality was currently being treated for venereal disease, or if a priest tumbled from his confessional to a television studio to report on the dismal philanderings of one of his respectable flock. Peripheral and disputed information from a police inquiry might seem to come under the same heading.
The government cannot be too surprised that they have made enemies of the police service. They have wilfully ignored police advice about the vast personnel cuts that have been imposed on the service which they seem to regard with a patrician disdain. We are in a strange time indeed when a leftwing Labour leader and a Labour London mayor seem to have a greater empathy with the police and their concerns than a Tory-led government.
A month ago, I attended a gathering in Bristol of journalists, lawyers, academics and journalism students to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the trial of two reporters and a former soldier charged in 1977 under the Official Secrets Act, which became known as the ABC case after the initials of the three defendants. The information that prompted the arrests and trial was, indeed, in the public interest, and it was heartening to hear speakers stressing the importance of defending the whistleblower and the right to shine a light into dark corners.
But the sad thing about the recent events is that they may make both serving and former officers even more reluctant to come forward with information which should certainly be in the public domain. In the wake of the illegal phone-hacking activities of a number of News of the World journalists, the relationship between the police and the media was dramatically changed. “There should be no more improper contact… between the police and the media – that which is of a selfish rather than a public interest,” was the baleful conclusion of the then Met commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, in the wake of the Leveson inquiry. As a result, the police have become nervous of talking off the record to reporters on subjects of genuine importance and we are all the poorer for it.
Duncan Campbell worked for the Guardian for more than 20 years as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent. He has written seven books, including The Underworld, a history of British crime from the 1930s to the 1990s. He is former chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association
