Paying the police: 'Greengate' and parliamentary privilege

On 27 November 2008 the Sergeant at Arms of the United Kingdom House of Commons, Ms Jill Pay, signed a'consent form' to permit the Counter Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police to search the office of then Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration, Damian Green, in Portcullis House on the parliamentary estate. Earlier that day Green had been arrested in his Ashford constituency in Kent. The police had warrants to search his home, his constituency office and his second home in London: they did not seek a warrant to search his parliamentary office. A week earlier a junior civil servant in the Home Office was also arrested and made certain admissions of leaking documents to an MP whom, it was said, had'groomed' him to do so. The actual arrest of Mr Green proved more difficult that first anticipated. Police officers staked out his home in a rural area of Kent and waited for him to emerge. When after some hours he failed to do so they phoned the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, to enquire of his whereabouts. They did not tell Cameron, who gave them Green's mobile phone number, that they intended to arrest the MP. Green was at a meeting in his constituency where he was eventually detained at about 1.50pm. It transpired that the police had the wrong house under surveillance. Green was informed that he was arrested not pursuant to the Official Secrets Act but on suspicion of an offence under the 18th century common law crime of'misconduct in public office', (R v Bembridge 1783 ) which attracts a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Coincidently, on the same day as Green's arrest, Mr Justice Southwell sitting at Kingston Crown Court threw out charges of'aiding and abetting willful misconduct in public office' filed 19 months earlier against Milton Keynes Citizen journalist Sally Murrer. Thames Valley police had alleged that Ms Murrer had induced one of their officers to leak confidential documents to her. Even though the material was described as'incomprehensibly trivial', and had never appeared in print, the police'bugged her phones, ransacked her home and office, confiscated her computers, ... , [and] humiliated her with a strip search. She also said that'I was told five times that I would go to prison for life'. Damien Green claimed that he too was similarly threatened by police. The case against Murrer failed because the judge ruled that the police had breached Article 10 of the European Human Rights Charter which protects the right of journalists to freedom of expression from interference from the state. The search of Green's parliamentary office while he was detained elsewhere and questioned by the Metropolitan Police naturally raised serious questions of parliamentary privilege---especially since the police removed from the Palace of Westminster his computer hard drive, phone records and other material that his lawyers claimed were undoubtedly privileged. Also controversial was the police failure to secure a warrant for the parliamentary search. At later parliamentary inquiries officers claimed that they did not need a warrant because they believed that access would be granted, but a very senior officer told a parliamentary committee that it was're-explained to the Sergeant at Arms why they could not seek a warrant, because a magistrate or judge would not give us a warrant because clearly they would believe Parliament would surely agree'. For her part, Ms Pay, while apologizing to MPs for the way the matter was handled, denied that she was'mislead','tricked' or'bamboozled' by the police into signing the consent form, she did say'I think I was pressured'. What is clear was that the interaction among the Sergeant, the Clerk of the House of Commons and Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, was less than adequate. Notably none of them was aware of the existence of a memorandum written by the then Commons Clerk, Sir William McKay, in 2000 which established detailed protocols for police searches on the parliamentary estate and gave the Speaker alone the right to grant permissions and challenge warrants.