The plebgate plot thickens

It is only fair to Andrew Mitchell M.P. that I should return briefly to the plebgate incident. When I last wrote about it (here) I said it was "morphing from one about a bad-tempered upper-class put-down into a case of a cabinet member telling lies about a law-enforcement matter, and slandering armed police officers who work for his government and may have to put their lives on the line protecting it from terrorist attack". Well, it has morphed more since then. It turns out that some police officers lied about the incident. Three have actually been arrested, and seven more are being investigated. And this morning Mitchell is reported as having filed a libel suit against the newspaper that broke the story.

The police on the scene said that several members of the public had witnessed the original incident and had been visible shocked, but Mitchell obtained closed circuit TV footage that revealed this was false. And an email claiming to come from an ordinary member of the public who witnessed the incident turned out to have come from a police officer in the diplomatic protection unit who had not even been in London at the time.

Mitchell has now sued The Sun, the newspaper that broke the story with great relish in September 2012. This will be complex. The Sun said Mitchell called the police "fucking plebs" in an ill-tempered outburst against officers who told him he couldn't ride his bike through the gates when exiting the short street where the prime minister lives, but had to walk it through a pedestrian gate. The story has just the right notes for The Sun: posh Rugby-educated member of parliament and top Conservative official in the House of Commons accuses brave police officers of being lower-class. (The Sun, which exhibits a girl with bare breasts every morning on page 3, is oriented toward the kind of working-class readers who support the Labour Party and hate snooty right-wing Tories like Mitchell.)

Mitchell, on the other hand, agrees that he swore at police who pointlessly hindered him at the end of a long working day, but denies that he said "plebs". So that's a satisfying story too: tired public servant frustrated by needlessly pedantic policemen harassing a well-known ministerial-level official of the government they serve by insisting on silly regulations — though said official would of course never insult honest officers by suggesting that they were lower-class.

Then again, police on duty at Downing Street on the day say he did say "plebs". That suggests Mitchell will have serving police officers testifying against his libel complaint and defending The Sun.

Yet other police officers, supporting those who oppose Mitchell, have apparently lied, and are being arrested for engaging in improper conduct and conspiring against him. So Mitchell may be able to get senior investigating officers to testify for him, rebutting the charges made by The Sun.

Welcome to the maelstrom of Westminster politics, English defamation law, British class warfare, and police/public conflict. This one will be hot, and I'll be following it closely.

In a legal tradition where the owner of a publishing company can feel that he has a reasonable chance of getting a million dollars of damages off a librarian who expresses an unfavorable opinion about the quality of the books published by his company (see my brief comments on the Dale Askey case here), hardly anything can be presumed likely or unlikely. Plaintiffs have won some astounding cases; but it isn't even clear here that the charge of having called someone a pleb is even particularly defamatory. Then again, it's clear that The Sun regarded it as juicily defamatory, which is why they blew it up into such a big thing that Mitchell was forced to resign from the most important office he had ever held.

I wouldn't bet a dime on the outcome of this one. I will just watch and report. But in the meantime, don't call any London policemen plebs; they may indeed come from the working class (very few policemen were educated at Rugby School), but they consider that word insulting. Just say "Yes, officer; thank you, officer," and get off your bike and walk through the gate they tell you to walk through.

Postscript: One of the charges in the two libel suits filed in Canada by the Edwin Mellen Press against Dale Askey claims that he should pay a million dollars in damages partly because he allowed false allegations about Mellen books being of poor quality to appear in the comments on his blog. One can't be too careful when dealing with the English defamation law tradition. And I work in the UK. So comments on this post will be opened immediately after hell freezes over or the present appalling winter ends in Edinburgh, whichever happens later.