Media
Sources, smears and coded messages
Published 07 May 2007
The Met's most senior anti-terrorist detective says irresponsible leaks are putting lives at risk. So how can we find out who these leakers are? I know, let's ask a detective
I am in receipt of a leak. It's such a small leak that perhaps "secretion" would describe it better, but it is none the less information I have been told confidentially by somebody vaguely in the know. He (or she - I'm not saying) informs me that the leak about which Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke was complaining so bitterly, just before we learned all about Operation Crevice, came from an "unusual source".
So, if you follow me, it was not one of the usual sources of leaks, but a different source. You might say that the authorities (I must not indicate whether I mean the government, Whitehall or Scotland Yard, so I'll just say "the authorities") sprang a new leak. Since, as I have mentioned, this nugget came to me off the record, I am not at liberty to tell you who provided it, but I'll tell you this: he (or she) is a journalist.
Confused? You should be, for the short-lived affair of Peter Clarke's leak was a marvel of 21st-century doublespeak and hypocrisy, guaranteed to addle the brain of sensible folk. It tells us something about why relations between the police and the public, and police and the government, are not all they should be.
The story began with Clarke, the country's top anti-terror detective, delivering a memorial lecture in honour of a former West Yorkshire chief constable who died last year. Clarke's main messages were about how important it was for the police to be above politics, and how convenient it would be if the pesky contempt laws did not prevent the police from prejudicing juries against defendants.
In a short aside, however, he expressed his contempt for people who deliberately leaked sensitive intelligence, either with the aim of sucking up to journalists or to "squeeze out some short-term presentational advantage". He mentioned, in particular, leaks relating to arrests in Birmingham, but he stressed (twice) that this was only one of many examples he could have cited.
This was a grave business, especially since Clarke stated that these leaks are putting lives at risk. So it was no surprise that a couple of days later the Prime Minister was asked in the Commons to set up an inquiry into who was doing the leaking. He declined. My sympathy was with Blair: an inquiry would be cumbersome and expensive. I have a simpler and cheaper idea: let's ask Clarke, the policeman-above-politics, who he was talking about. He works just down the road at Scotland Yard, and he seems to know.
If he doesn't say or can't say, let's tell him to shut up. We are paying his salary and he is, for heaven's sake, a detective, trained to find and arrest wrongdoers and not to send them coded messages in memorial lectures. His officers and their MI5 colleagues may, or may not, be doing a good job pursuing would-be bombers (and Crevice has not produced a conclusive answer) but he has no business playing these political games. They will only rebound on him.
It doesn't end there. Other people know the identity of these leakers who are supposedly putting lives at risk. There are the leakers themselves, of course, though we are unlikely to hear much from that quarter. But there are also the journalists to whom they leaked.
What of them? We can't really expect them to come forward and identify their confidential sources, but a little candour would not go astray, for there is something ludicrous about the spectacle of our national newspapers treating all of this as a great mystery. They are like a bunch of schoolboys caught in the lavatories in a haze of tobacco smoke, expressing wide-eyed astonishment at the teacher's suggestion that somebody has been having a cigarette.
They know. Or at least some of them know, and a good many others have a jolly good idea. Surely it would be more honest for those involved to admit this and explain that they are prevented from naming their sources, than to insult their readers' intelligence with half-baked follow-up stories, most of them attributed to unnamed sources.
The history that isn't
There are few things that the conservative papers love more than a chance to revisit the heroic pageant that is British history, and they had a perfect opportunity in Jack Straw's think-tank article about the need for an inspiring common narrative for Britain.
Freedom lies at the heart of the British story, Straw argued, and that is the message that needs to be communicated if we are to bind together multicultural Britain.
The Daily Telegraph duly responded with pictures of Churchill making a V sign, William Wilberforce, Emmeline Pankhurst, a Spitfire, Oliver Cromwell and King John signing the Magna Carta with a quill pen.
But this is not history at all. History is complex and awkward, and we each see in it what we want. What Straw is talking about, and what the Telegraph seems to be applauding, is propaganda.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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