London mayor calls for urgent review of coronation arrests by Met Police

Hello, some breaking news: Adam Price has resigned as leader by Plaid Cymru. For now that’s all we know. I said yesterday I would act on readers’ comments and there was plenty of appetite for more grumbling about the Metropolitan Police.

The Met is once again under fire, this time for a series of arrests made during the coronation. The force said it “regrets” the arrest of six people, including Graham Smith, the chief executive of anti-monarchy group Republic, who was detained for 16 hours.

Some thoughts on this and your questions about the story in today’s note.

Not my bike lock

Sadik Khan called the metropolitan police to urgently re-examine the circumstances which led to the arrest and detention of dozens of demonstrators during the coronation of Charles III.

There are three layers to this story: the new Public Order Act, which some say severely and dangerously restricted the right to protest, the operational decisions of the Metropolitan Police regarding policing at the Coronation , and the long- running breakdowns of the Met.

Full disclosure: One of the people who thinks the Public Order Act dangerously limits the right to protest is me. But I think the law is the least of the problems in terms of controversial arrests that we know of: the arrest of six members of the anti-monarchist group Republic, including its chief executive Graham Smith, and three members of the night security team of Westminster.

The law creates a series of new offenses, the most important of which for our purposes is “locking in”: locking you, say, on a bridge to disrupt transportation, for example. Now one issue is that the difference between bringing gear to, say, tie your Not My King sign on a fence as Charles III passes in his car and bringing gear to tie yourself in the middle of the road as the car passes is not obvious.

But when it comes to the decision-making that led to the arrest and detention of Smith and his fellow campaigners, it shouldn’t have been difficult. A Republic representative met with the Met’s protest liaison team ahead of the event to discuss their organisation’s plans. A single phone call to the Met’s own liaison team could and should have solved the problem in minutes, without resulting in Smith being detained for 16 hours.

Personally, I still think there are big problems with the law, and that Keir Starmer’s argument that its rough edges might eventually be ironed out through case law is wrong. But as far as these arrests go, this is all just an accessory to the operational failure of one part of the Met to talk to another part of the Met. If one day you make 64 arrests before the end of the weekend and you have to issue a statement saying you “regret” six of them – that’s almost one in 10 arrests – your operational record is clearly below normal .

While Khan’s call for an urgent review is welcome, policing the coronation – a national event involving guests from countries around the world – is an example of one of the Met’s national responsibilities. .

Khan is of the opinion that because so many of the Met’s national responsibilities take place in London – it’s the site of our national parliament, it faces a lot of terrorist threats, it’s where the coronation takes place and other royal events, etc. on — the dual role of the Met is essential.

I’m much more likely to agree with Nick Timothy, one of Theresa May’s former advisers and someone who has done more than most to reform the police in the UK, who has long argued that the functions of the Met should be divided: a local force focused on the daily challenges facing London and reporting to the mayor, and a national force reporting to the Minister of the Interior.

One of the reasons is my own experience writing about the Met: basically every failure – for those of you who need a refresher, William Wallis wrote a great article on strength difficulties last summer – causes a back-and-forth about how it’s the Home Secretary’s fault, or how it’s really the fault of the Mayor of London. Improvement begins with clear lines of accountability, which the Met’s dual role makes impossible.

What is the probability of this happening? Louise Casey’s damning scrutiny of Met culture and standards called for the force to be overhauled or disbanded, while Keir Starmer hinted he was ready to do the same.

In practice, I think it’s unlikely. Although Starmer has direct experience of turning around a police force since his involvement in the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to replace Northern Ireland’s ailing Royal Ulster Constabulary, if Labor comes into office, his great political challenge will be immigration and asylum. I think whoever is Home Secretary is unlikely to push through a reform that Khan, a Labor mayor, does not also support, or have the bandwidth to do so. (Also, even though they will have a Labor mayor, it will still be in the interest of the Labor Secretary of State to be able to blur who exactly is responsible for the Met’s shortcomings.)

On the Tory side, energy and thought have drained on this issue since Theresa May left office and I don’t see that coming back any time soon. I was hoping at the time of the Casey review that it offered Rishi Sunak the opportunity to do something remarkable on police reform. He had a leader of the opposition who was on his side, a serious independent report to draw on, and a lot of expertise and thought on his side to draw on. He chose not to. If the Tories go into opposition, they will surely opt for the sugar rush by simply criticizing the government rather than reinventing the serious reform proposals they had under David Cameron.

I think it is much more likely that the Public Order Act will not survive a change of government: whatever Keir Starmer says, precisely because a Labor government will quickly find itself at odds with its wing liberal on migration, I just think in order to prevent the party and his government from becoming seriously divided, he will have to review the law. That momentum doubles if he ends up relying on the Liberal Democrats to pass laws.

Now try this

Here’s a rather sweet story: a tweet from a Twitter user gloating in a, shall we say, unusual pseudonym has sent This is how you lose the time wara wonderful epistolary short story about two rival spies fighting in a war across time and space, went viral and propelled the book to bestseller lists.

having reviewed at the time for The Big Issue, one of the reasons the tweet did so well I think is that it’s a charming and clever story about forbidden love in a dictatorship that’s hard not to love. I devoured it in one sitting, and I’m still annoyed that my review didn’t convey how much I enjoyed it. (That said, James Lovegrove, reviewing it for the FT, didn’t care as much as I do.)

I highly recommend it, alongside the other very different book I reviewed alongside it: Linda Grant’s brilliant novel A foreign city, which Suzi Feay reviewed for the FT here.

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