On 20 October, the Prime Minister’s then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was walking down Belgrave Road in Westminster, returning home from a restaurant. A man wearing a balaclava reportedly raced past on a bike and snatched his phone out of his hand.
The No 10 aide called 999 and reported the details of what happened. He told the Metropolitan Police it happened on Belgrave Street, and it took down the wrong address – recording the location as Belgrave Street in east London rather than Belgrave Road in Pimlico – and, according to the Times, was “too busy” to investigate further (it denies this, saying it tried twice to contact him). The call handler told McSweeney there was “extreme demand on police officers” and was unsure about how long it would take to deploy one to the scene. He was given a crime reference number and the case was closed.
All government and relevant ex-government figures are currently being forced to disclose their communications with the disgraced former US ambassador and Jeffrey Epstein associate Peter Mandelson. The phone messages of McSweeney – Mandelson’s closest ally in government, at the time of his appointment to US ambassador – are unlikely to be found.
The Met is now reassessing the case: “Having identified this error [in the address], the report will be amended and the assessment of whether there is available evidence revisited.”
Judging that there was no available CCTV at the scene, the Met originally had not seen “any realistic lines of inquiry”. It’s a familiar cop-out. Anyone who’s had a bike or phone stolen in the capital lately will have had the same experience. When my bike was stolen in east London, along with all the other bikes on the set of racks on a well-lit main road, the case was instantly closed – and there was CCTV in that case.
The thing is, police can find your phone. Smartphones, cars and bikes fitted with trackers are traceable through GPS. All too often, victims of theft can see precisely where their stolen item is, but the police won’t follow this up. This can lead to people taking law and order into their own hands (ending up in risky attempts at vigilantism or, worse, X threads broadcasting the sad story of their Schrodinger’s iPhone).
And the police could definitely have investigated McSweeney’s case further in particular. While he did not make clear who he was, he did mention it was a government phone. I remember one copper telling me a few years ago that they were told by their sergeant to treat the theft of one influential MP’s bike “as a murder investigation” (turning up for a face-to-face interview at their home only to find a collection of expensive bikes hanging on the wall).
So why didn’t they? As the public, we have a “cops and robbers” conception of police forces. This is the service that catches the bad guys and turns up when a crime is committed against us. But a whole swathe of criminality, including snatch theft, has for a while no longer been the police’s de facto remit.
Under the coalition government, policing underwent a quiet but significant strategic shift – focusing less on “volume” crime (burglaries, vehicle theft, etc) and more on “higher-harm” crime (child abuse, sex crime, violence). This was partly as a response to the emergence of once-hidden child sexual exploitation cases (grooming gangs, Jimmy Savile) around that time, but also budget cuts that whittled away at the state from 2010. This was at a time when long-term reductions in the “volume” crime side of things had decreased their public salience.
Now, of course, such crimes – often described as “petty” or “low-level” – are on the up again, both in occurrences and salience. Snatch-theft in particular is rife, because your smartphone is a lot more valuable to the thief if it’s unlocked when they steal it, according to one criminologist I’ve spoken to.
A rise in such cases has sent “volume” crime high up in the list of voter priorities again. The Met – forever accused of “two-tier” policing and, during Partygate, of “one rule for them and another for us” – would perhaps be more conscious therefore of allotting more time to retrieving the phone of a top government aide than the rest of the 320 phone thefts a day reported in the capital last year.
The problem now, it seems, is less “one rule for them and another for us”, and more “no rules at all”.
[Further reading: Matt Brittin is the BBC’s next big mistake]
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