The dignity of the House
Imagine, if you will, that under the premiership of Clem Attlee or of Winston, post-War, a Fleet Street baron of the Rothermere or Astor stamp, and editors as venal as Geoffrey Dawson had been before the War, were to be examined by a Select Committee of the House.
In those days, the House of Commons was the House of Commons, not a glorified PCC subservient to unelected foreign masters skulking in Brussels. Accordingly, its hon. and right hon. Members were the best Britain could return to office; and they were even so late as the 1950s not, in the main, career, professional politicians whose lives had been spent ascending the greasy pole - or polls. They included officers, City magnates, keen-minded silks skilled in the examination of witnesses, decorated soldiers, and gentlemen.
In those days, also, the Met were apolitical, honest, and led by men of the calibre of Sir Harold Scott and Sir John Nott-Bower: cautious, perhaps, narrow, certainly, but wholly incorruptible and dedicated.
Rather than an awkward squad composed of dubious solicitors with form when it comes to bung, bullying, and dodgy expenses, chick-lit novelists, and fat-faced expenses-troughing buffoons, the Select Committee of this imagined enquiry should have included a Captain Bellenger, say, or a Richard Crossman, a Quintin Hogg or a Hartley Shawcross, a Derick Heathcoat-Amery, a Stafford Cripps or a Selwyn Lloyd.
No MP of that era - even the handful who may have secretly wished it - should have called for ‘regulation’ of the press as a result. The Met of that era should not have been tainted by complaisance - if not worse - in the issues before the Select Committee; and it should have provided security to the Members and the witnesses.
Whereas today.... Change and decay in all around I see, yes; but worse than that. Clowns, crooks, and liars sitting in judgement, fools and incompetents with warrant cards: the moral authority of the House and of the police, as well as their dignity, are so far from being vindicated as to put the House and the police on a level with those summoned before them, charged with grave misconduct.
It is farce; it is also disaster. We deserve better, and must demand it.