The first time Damian Green had any idea that he was about to be arrested last
November was when he was approached by four police officers as he left a
constituency meeting in Kent. “It was the full works, like you see in the
movies,” he said. “They handed me a warrant and read me my rights.”
Mr Green, 53, the Shadow immigration spokesman, was accused of putting
national security at risk and grooming a Home Office civil servant to leak
secret documents. He said that the whole thing would have been terrifying
had it not been so farcical. “It was like the Keystone Cops,” he said.
“First they couldn’t find me and telephoned David Cameron’s office to try to
track me down. Then they said, ‘We have a warrant to search your home’, but
they had surrounded the wrong house.”
Mr Green was driven to a police station in Belgravia for questioning while
officers from the anti-terrorism squad searched the entire house, even
combing the bedroom for evidence of illegal activity. Simultaneously the
police were raiding his Commons office and riffling through his love letters
to his wife, Alicia, in his London home.
Mrs Green, a barrister, watched with growing concern as the investigation
became more intrusive. “The police were polite but they were searching a
crime scene,” Mr Green said. “Initially Alicia was friendly, until they
started leafing through personal stuff and then she faced them down. The
love letters were 20 years old and they were supposed to be looking for
information from 2007 and 2008. The most important thing was the computer
with all my wife’s work on it. It is full of her cases so she had legal
professional privilege and she would not let them take it.”
In Kent, however, there was no one to stop the police seizing armfuls of
equipment and papers. “They took everything, not just the computer: the
phones, the faxes, all electronic communication, books, Post-it Notes, bank
statements. They even took my copy of Essential Law For Journalists,
which I hadn’t looked at since I was a trainee journalist. The most
disturbing thing was that they had gone through the bed: the duvet had been
rearranged. It was like being burgled.”
His 15-year-old daughter arrived home from school in London to find the police
scouring the family’s rooms. “She was shocked, she burst into tears. Alicia
explained to her, ‘Daddy’s been arrested’. I couldn’t talk to either of
them. I hadn’t been able to warn them about anything.”
Mr Green was held at the police station for nine hours. The experience was, he
said, disorientating and surreal. “They had my briefcase and they were
leafing through it. It reached its nadir when they took out a fax cover
sheet, a parliamentary answer and a newspaper cutting as evidence of illegal
activity. The officer said, ‘I just want to check that you think this is
fair’. At that point I said, ‘I think the whole procedure is the most
outrageous thing I have heard’. ”
He thought it odd that the police took nine days to arrest him after they had
taken in Christopher Galley, his Home Office source, for questioning about a
series of leaks. “If there had been any national security implication they
were being appallingly negligent,” he said. “If I had actually had the
nuclear codes, I would have had nine days to get rid of them. So it was
always clear to me that the whole national security idea was false from the
start and they must have known that . . . There never was and never would be
any threat to national security from me. If I received information that I
thought was a threat to national security, of course I wouldn’t put it in
the public domain.”
Mr Green finds it hard to believe that the police did not inform the Home
Secretary that they were about to arrest an opposition frontbench spokesman.
“I have spoken to former senior ministers of both parties and everyone says,
‘Of course we would have been told,’ ” he said.
Although he never thought that he would be spending the rest of his life
behind bars, as the police suggested to him, he thinks that his arrest
reveals a dangerously authoritarian streak. “This was the first time since
we became a democracy that an opposition MP had been arrested for political
work. Of course MPs are not above the law, but by any standards what I was
doing was political work of the kind that has been done by politicians for
years, notably and very successfully by Gordon Brown. Arresting opposition
politicians is something you associate with police states.”
This week, Mr Green was cleared by the Director of Public Prosecutions. He
has, he said, received thousands of e-mails and letters from wellwishers in
the five months since his arrest. “A lot of the policemen around the House
of Commons, the people I see every day who guard and protect us, have
quietly patted me on the back and said good luck. Several former and current
Cabinet ministers have privately expressed their support.” Jacqui Smith,
however, has studiously avoided him and he has had no personal note of
apology from Gordon Brown.
The Home Secretary should, in his view, carry the can. “It is clear that the
Home Office is not well run, which in the end is her responsibility. The
Home Affairs Select Committee said that the Whitehall machine massively
exaggerated the national security implications.” He is also critical of the
police. “You cannot generalise but there are policemen who have got too
close to the Government of the day. Bob Quick [the former head of Scotland
Yard’s anti-terrorism squad] had a mindset that instantly blamed the Tory
party when a story was published in The Mail on Sunday [about
his wife’s business interests]. That was hugely inappropriate.”
H e was pleased that Mr Quick, who authorised his arrest, resigned this month
over another matter. “I thought that he should not be in charge of the anti-
terror squad because the day they arrested me was the day of the Mumbai
bombings. Al-Qaeda might have been trying to do a worldwide spectacular. It
did seem to me that to have 25 of the anti-terror squad going through my
bank statements and my bed was not what the head of the anti-terror squad
should have wanted.”
There were in his view sinister aspects to the investigation. The police
checked his e-mails for information on Britain’s leading civil liberties
group. “They chose key words to search all the e-mails and documents and
among the more noteworthy and alarming words they were searching were Shami
Chakrabarti, [the director of Liberty]. The police wanted to look at every
e-mail over the past few years between an opposition politician and a civil
liberties campaigner, although Shami Chakribarti had nothing to do with any
of the leaks. This feels to me like a fishing expedition on somebody who
embarrasses the government of the day. That is very disturbing.”
It was, he said, appalling that the police were allowed into his Commons
office without a warrant. “The House authorities gave the police a letter of
permission to raid this office. They should not have done that. The police
should have got a warrant . . . If an MP is using his office for criminal
activity then clearly that should be like any other office. My very strong
objection in this case is that I was not doing anything that could be
construed as criminal activity.”
Mr Green admitted that, if he were Home Secretary, he would be cross if a
civil servant was leaking but he said: “There is a difference between being
cross and somebody ending up being arrested. All governments have leaks. The
key is the way you run the department. If something is going wrong then you
try and solve it and do not try and cover it up. Christopher Galley was
whistleblowing — there are times when that is necessary.”
Did he groom him? “No, that is absurd. He approached us.” Mr Green, a
liberal Tory who calls himself a “wet”, has become an unlikely hero of the
Conservative Right. “If I become a symbol of how we must be completely
vigilant about civil liberties and about the rights of opposition
politicians, newspapers and journalists to expose power then that is a step
forward.”
The villain is now Damian McBride. Mr Green thinks that the comparison between
the two cases is revealing. “There is a huge contrast between the amount of
effort put into investigating and arresting me and the very cursory
investigation of what Damian McBride was doing, and I think people should
reflect on that contrast.”
LIFE AND TIMES
Born 1956
Education Reading School and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1977 he was
president of the Oxford Union
Career He was a financial journalist for the BBC and Channel 4 news
before getting a job in John Major’s policy unit in 1992. He was elected as
MP for Ashford in 1997. The next year he became a frontbench spokesman on
education and employment and in 2001 was promoted to Shadow Education
Secretary by Iain Duncan Smith. He covered transport under Michael Howard,
resigned in 2004, then returned to the front bench under David Cameron in
2005 as immigration spokesman. He was arrested last November over a series
of Home Office leaks. He is on the liberal wing of the Conservative Party,
chairman of Parliamentary Mainstream and a vice-president of the Tory Reform
Group
QUICK FIRE
Family He is married to Alicia, a barrister, and has two daughters
Robin Hood or Guy Fawkes? Robin Hood
Wet or dry? Wet
West Wing or Yes Minister? West Wing
Attack dog or underdog? Underdog
Porridge or caviar? Caviar
