Pleb

WHAT started as an altercation with police at the Downing Street gates and moved swiftly to a cabinet minister's resignation has now gone full circle with the police themselves under scrutiny.

Mr Mitchell had sworn because the police asked him to leave by a side-exit. But their report had claimed something more sinister - that he called them 'plebs'. This single word was to be the railing upon which Mitchell was impaled.

'Pleb' is instantly recognisable as a sneery, public schoolboy kind of word. 'Pleb' - a person of a lower social order – a vile class snobbery. And surely the word fitted the hapless Mitchell? Was he not a public school boy? Did he not represent the party, relentlessly branded by opponents as being for toffs alone? Was this not just the remark that one might expect of this stern patrician who had earned the iron-hard soubriquet 'Thrasher'.

Well, all may have been left there but for the evidence. You see, the officers referred in their report to many people having witnessed Mr Mitchell's hissy fit. But the CCTV footage showed there were none. Then there was the email from a passer-by disgusted by Mitchell's language. Only that was fabricated by another officer. Then there was the misrepresentation by officers of Mitchell's meeting held to clear the air with the Police Federation. And now we have a police-led report that finds little for the police to answer.

The truth will win out of course – here injustice was metered out to too big a man. I firmly support our police but this incident has made me think. About those less fortunate who might suffer similar stitch-ups. Those without the power and influence. The people to whom those policemen themselves were perhaps alluding when they conjured that ugly word 'pleb'.