three gang monte

So how’s three gang theory getting on in the light of this?

Herbert, while praising the "decent majority" of officers whom he says do "brilliant" work, suggests that for too long the police have been shielded from criticism by a lack of accountability and an unhealthily cosy relationship with sections of the press that rely on officers leaking "juicy" information.

In a sign of how Mitchell's resignation as chief whip in October, after he was accused of calling officers guarding the Downing Street gates "fucking plebs", is causing continuing bitterness and division in government, the ex-minister also has a sideswipe at cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, implying that he failed to investigate the police claims thoroughly enough.

To recap, I proposed that what would happen after Leveson would be a function of what happened to the relationship between the three gangs  - the press, the police and the politicians – whose mutually supportive relations had been partly exposed and disrupted by the enquiry. This is of course complicated by the fact that the government have been making a frontal assault on police numbers and pensions.

Leveson went very easy on the political and police gangs, which I presumed was an opportunity for them to unite against the press. This clearly hasn’t happened. Instead, we have a situation of open conflict between the cops and the pols, with the press playing a an apparently subordinate role, something which the Sun in particular seemed eager to do. That  in turn may relate back to the government’s role in enabling Leveson. Hence Herbert’s allusion to ‘cosy relations’ between the cops and ,sections of the press’.

Even before that stage had been reached it was remarkable that very low ranking officers had come up with and executed what looked like a watertight scheme to verbal the chief whip out of office, as though he was some bloke in the street. That’s assuming they did come up with the whole thing by themselves, including the plan to activate Mitchell’s deputy and rival against him by posing as his constituent. If it’s the first, the politicians will be terrified that their personal protection squads seem to have turned against them. If they did it with a little help from within the government’s own ranks, that’s indicative of a state of permanent chaos.

Herbert seems to be hinting at using Leveson’s findings to set up a firewall between the cops and the press. That’s a logical move from the politics gang’s point of view, especially if the Prime Minister has just let DC Stitchemup bounce him into letting the man responsible for the integrity of his entire legislative agenda go.  But it puts the cops in roughly the same position as Assad with his scuds. With the opposition encroaching on your territory you throw whatever you’ve got in the armoury at them. And given that the press are affected as well, the cops should be able count on enthusiastic support from that quarter. 

Comments

[Alex]

Who controls the No.10 Downing St CCTV? Is it the Met, is it the Cabinet Office, is it the MI5 Protective Security people, is it ACPO's National Counter-Terrorist Security Office?

NaCTSO's mission seems to be more about advising police forces and civilian organisations about terrorism. CPNI, the infrastructure cell in MI5, might be more like it but seems to lean to Big Infrastructure. However, it does sound like their problem as they have the responsibility to advise on protective security across government.

So Spooks vs. Cops or Bureaucrats vs. Cops or even Cops vs. Cops is a possibility.

[johnf]

Someone at the time of the bank crash said the advantage of a massive recession was, as the tide receded, everyone got to see who had been wearing swimming costumes and who was butt naked.

The whole edifice of power seems to have become fissiparious (like any essentially tribal set up). Within the politicians there are the Downing St Cameroons (attacked by Mitchell supporters and the Tebbit Euro Brigades); there is the Davis/Mitchell faction who were whips at the time of Maastricht and hate the rebels, but also hate the treacherous Cameron; and there are the anti-European Tebbitists who are sclerotic and hate-filled.

Among the Press there is a Mexican StandOff as everyone fights for the last reader. The Murdochs hate The Graun but are lost behind a paywall and imminent decapitation from News Corp; The Graun and the Torygraph admire each others' investigative journalism but are fighting over readers; and Paul Dacre who is genuinely insane but also faking it by attacking everything that is even partly human.

And the Plod are spilt between rooling as they always rooled; their nice backhanders and pensions from Murdochsville; and their natural loyalties to the party of Thatcher which is simultaneously shafting them with redundancies and denunciations.

[dsquared]

As the resident esoteric correspondent, I would remind readers that all three gangs (the Metropolitan Police, Westminster correspondents of the major newspapers and the Conservative Party) have a hell of a lot of Freemasons in them.

[Guano]

From the Guardian article of 22 December, it appears that Herbert has said that "reforms, including the introduction of elected police commissioners, must serve to hold the police more closely to account."

The problem is that I don't think that the public sees elected police commissioners as an effective way of holding the police to account. There is less way of knowing how the Commissioner is interacting with the police than when there are open meetings of a police authority and most of the candidates for commissioner posts were unknown quantities. I fear that the accountability is not going to be to the public.

[guthrie]

Not to mention PCC's instantly recruiting an office full of well paid staff to help them do their job. That immediately gets up people's noses.
Also it appears on the face of it that the job has been more thoroughly politicised because of the candidates standing as people from specific party's. Everyone can see that an oath of impartiality doesn't guarantee anything.

Also is it appropriate to refer to the police as a whole as a gang, or perhaps as 2 separate gangs, i.e. the top brass and the rank and file, with somewhat divergent aims and the occasional alliance?

[A Different Alex]

Also is it appropriate to refer to the police as a whole as a gang, or perhaps as 2 separate gangs, i.e. the top brass and the rank and file, with somewhat divergent aims and the occasional alliance?

Quite. The Winsor reforms look important on that score.

As the resident esoteric correspondent, I would remind readers that all three gangs (the Metropolitan Police, Westminster correspondents of the major newspapers and the Conservative Party) have a hell of a lot of Freemasons in them.

I don't know who you're referring to, but I did find these:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/04/david-cameron-freemasons-westminster

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/08/phone-hacking-scandal-jonathan-rees

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8713343/Freemasons-in-the-police-leading-the-attack-on-David-Camerons-riot-response.html

But if you want another conspiracy theory (not one I believe, just find it entertaining to contemplate), consider the possibility that Tessa Jowell was an agent for Boris Johnson.

[guthrie]

Do the masons really have much influence in the police these days? They used to in Lothian and Borders back in the 70's or so, but not as far as I have heard by 2000 or so.

[dsquared]

They have less and less influence generally as the society gradually dies off, but it is still very notable that, nearly twenty years after an official policy statement that serving policemen should not be Masons, they are still forming new lodges.

[Guano]

There was some kind of assistant at my son's school who, I noticed, often wore cuff-links with masonic symbols. I was intrigued at the vagueness of his status and the cuff-links. I went to one open evening and noticed he wasn't there so I asked the Deputy Head where he was. The answer was "He left at the end of last term and joined the Police."