It all added up to an afternoon where government of the country felt entirely at the mercy of events. In the old phrase, in office but perhaps not really in power.
Updated: 27th November 2014. Andrew Mitchell has lost his libel trial carried against The Sun newspaper and the four police witnesses from the Downing Street security detail. The judge, Justice Mitford, decided on the balance of probablities that Mitchell had used the word (or something close to them). Costs of the trial are guesstimated at several million.
The text of the Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference 10th October 2012. The Jimmy Savile revelations also continue and appear to be heading towards his long years of service at St James’s Hospital in Leeds and at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire.
The government’s chief whip Andrew Mitchell (the PM’s midfield enforcer) has sworn at several policemen and called them something far too class conscious for a representative of a ‘Posh’ government full of wealthy former public schoolboys.
All such modern media problems are compromised by the politics of the newspapers in the run-up to publication of Lord Justice Leveson’s report. The paper leading the charge on Mitchell and the police is The Sun and their relations with the Police have already been the subject of much conversational and legal scrutiny.
Mitchell’s careless and contemptuous clanger is a terrible goal for the government to concede and there might well still be a sending off which the increasingly knocked-about PM can ill-afford.
