News from Labour Matters

Conservative indignation over Green’s arrest may (or may not) be warranted

The political blogosphere is awash in comments about yesterday’s arrest of Shadow Immigration minister Damian Green, much of it of the knee jerk variety. Conservative blogs are indignant, and in parts shrill, in defence of their man. Denials of prior Ministerial knowledge are being discounted as lies, whilst prior knowledge of leading Conservatives are being ignored by them. Nothing to see there then.

Instead it is Liberal Conspiracy which has written the most thoughtful of articles, even more so than the mainstream media so far, which not only summarises what is known so far but also adding the following supposition:

“However, its it final piece of leaked information cited by the BBC that could, were it be linked to Green, give him a serious problem – a list, compiled by Labour’s Whip’s Office of potential Labour rebels on the 42 days pre-charge detention vote. That is a (party) political matter that, while it may of interest to the public (and the opposition, of course) is not a matter of legitimate public interest, not least at relates to the voting intentions of members of the legislature and not to a matter of government – although one hesitates to use the ‘W’ word (Watergate), the leaking of party political information to opposition members falls outside the legitimate scope of the public interest and amounts to political espionage.

I would hope that Green has not been stupid enough to accept information of that kind, but if he has and if, as the wording of one of the two charges implies, he may not only have a been passive recipient of leaked information but actually have taken an active part in soliciting and procuring information of that kind, then not only do the Tories protestations that he was only doing his job as MP ring extremely hollow but we have a major issue of political sleaze on out hand that Green, at the very least, will have problems wriggling out from under and which could easily engulf Conservative Central Office and the whole of its party machine if were to be shown that Green had passed information on to other ministers or to Tory HQ.”
Read the full article.

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