So why didn’t the police go for David Davis? This is one of the questions hanging in the air after the arrests of the Tory immigration spokesman, Damian Green, and Christopher Galley, his Home Office source. After all, Davis was Green’s boss when Galley first made contact in 2006. The former shadow home secretary and Tory leadership candidate has written: “Damian is among the most straightforward and honourable of people. He worked for me when I was shadow home secretary. Everything he did as shadow immigration minister he did with my implicit or explicit support.” Is it conceivable that Galley made direct contact with Green? Far more likely that he would have approached tough-talking Davis, who had a long-standing reputation as a ministerial scalp-taker and had already made use of leaked information to embarrass Beverley Hughes and David Blunkett. Peter Mandelson is almost certainly right when he suggests such a sensitive whistleblower relationship would have been cleared at the highest level of the Conservative Party, possibly by David Cameron himself.
At the time of writing, Davis had not been questioned by the police, though they are said to be interested in what the MP for Haltemprice and Howden might have to say. But the Metropolitan Police is in difficulty here. If officers invite Davis for a polite chat it will be hard to explain why this approach was not used with Galley and Green. The police have displayed a grave (if understandable) failure to grasp how politics works. This, rather than a political decision to target a member of the opposition, is likely to have been behind the raid on Green’s offices. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has talked repeatedly of the importance of respecting the “operational independence” of the police, but there is a clear conflict when this interferes with the operational independence of a member of parliament.
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