A sad day for the police - and Labour should apologise

A few days ago I posted as a quote of the day the words

"Everyone makes mistakes, but only a person with integrity owns up to them.”

How apposite those words are to today's news.

It is very sad, and deeply worrying, that a serving police officer should have lied about the then cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell. If a police officer can stitch up and bring down a cabinet minister with lies, what on earth can they do to the rest of us?

I have a number of friends who are present or former police officers. Like, I am convinced, the vast majority of police officers they are men and women of enormous integrity who would never dream of
fitting up an innocent person.

The trouble is that it only takes one or two rotten apples to destroy the reputation of the whole barrel.

The only good aspect of the whole sorry saga is that the truth eventually came out - and Michael Crick has risen very greatly in my estimation because of the role he played in ensuring that it did. Journalists have had almost as much flak as politicians over the past few years and it is good to see an example of evidence that dogged honest journalism and willingness to pursue what looked at first like an unlikely line of inquiry does still exist.

I hope that everyone involved in this will take a good hard look at what they said and did during the so-called "plebgate" saga, including the Met, the government, the rest of the press and, yes, the opposition.

Let's not forget that Labour actually posted an online petition which you can still find on twitter here (hat-tip to George Morrall) inferring that Andrew Mitchell was lying, and encouraging people to call on him to "come clean."

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions in my political career when I have said something about someone else which turned out to be untrue, and none of them were remotely as serious or harmful as what Labour did to Andrew Mitchell, but on those occasions I felt honour bound to withdraw the statement and apologise.

Labour owes Andrew Mitchell such an apology.

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