Green Cleared

Damian Green MP will not face any charges. Thank God for that.

This means that, despite this Government's worst intentions, we still have a Judiciary which is sufficiently independent such that the Executive can't just push it around and tell it what to do. Much as Brown and his cohorts would love to ignore the law of the land and lock up whomever they like, we're not at the stage where they can. Yet.

Attention should now fall (but it probably won't) on the Civil Servants who tried to stitch up Green and his alleged mole Christopher Galley in the first place. These are the people who claimed that the leaks caused "considerable damage to national security". The leaks, in case you've forgotten, centred around:
....a warning to Jacqui Smith that illegal immigrants were being cleared to work in sensitive Whitehall security jobs (the leak was about the warning, not about the clearances, which were already public knowledge);
....a mail to home office minister Liam Byrne telling him about an illegal Brazilian immigrant who was supposedly working in Parliament using a fake ID;
....a letter from Jacqui Smith to Gordon "Sorry" Brown saying that the recession might lead to a rise in crime;
....a list of Labour MPs expected to rebel against the 42 days proposal.
Highly embarrassing, and damaging to the the government's credibility ? Yes, absolutely.
Threat to national security ? You're having a laugh.

The homes affairs committee, having looked into this, has today lambasted the claims the calims that national security was compromised, and says that the police were misled.

For me this goes to the very heart of all the issues around the politicisation of the Civil Service. In very significant areas now, they are not the servant of "the government". They are instead servants of the Labour Party. And despite the fact that Labour are in government, those are two very different things.

The Civil Servants at the centre of this have behaved appallingly. They should be held to account.