Just the Facts, Please, Sir

That gifted entertainer, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has given his Christmas message to the public. There is good news and there is bad news.

The good news is that Sir Ian is "confident that I will not face any kind of misconduct in relation to Stockwell". Given the way in which the officer in charge at Stockwell was punished, this seems an eminently plausible prediction. As to Forest Gate, where the police raided a house in which no incriminating evidence was found and shot a man who had not committed any crime, Sir Ian denied that officers had got it wrong. "If we have credible intelligence from more than one source that a device is in a certain place we have to go in" and, depending on the results, it may also become necessary to smear the victim for paedophilia as well. Better safe than sorry, after all.

The bad news is that, despite the Vicar of Downing Street's pledges to introduce ID cards and replace Trident with something even nicer, we face "a far graver threat in terms of civilians than either the Cold War or the Second World War". The threat is also "a much graver threat than that posed by Irish Republican terrorism" and is also of an "unparalleled nature and growing" and is also "ever present". As one would expect of an ever-present threat, Christmas is "a period when [a terrorist attempt] might happen", just like every other day of the year. Sir Ian knows this because "we have no specific intelligence to do [with] that", which clearly settles the matter. Anyone too cunning for the Met, the scourge of Brian Haw and Maya Evans, must be a grave threat indeed.