Khan calls for urgent review after Met ‘regret’ over anti-monarchy arrests

Good morning, some breaking news: Adam Price has resigned as leader of Plaid Cymru. For now that’s all we know. I said yesterday that I would act on reader feedback and there was a lot of appetite for more grumbling about the Metropolitan Police.

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

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

Not my bike lock

Sadiq Khan has called for the Metropolitan Police to urgently review the circumstances that led to the arrest and detention of dozens of protesters during the coronation of Charles III.

There are three layers to this story: the new Public Order Act, which some people believe has sharply and dangerously limited the right to protest, the Metropolitan Police’s operational decisions around the policing of the coronation, and the much discussed and well-known long-running failures of the Met.

Full disclosure: one of the people who believes the Public Order Act dangerously limits the right to protest is me. But I think the act is the least of the problems in terms of the controversial arrests that we know about: the arrest of six members of the antimonarchist group Republic, including its chief executive Graham Smith, and of three members of Westminster’s night safety team.

The act creates a series of new offences, most importantly for our purposes that of “locking on”: locking yourself to, say, a bridge to disrupt transport, for instance. Now one problem is that the difference between bringing material to, say, tie your “Not My King” placard on to a fence as Charles III passes in his carriage and bringing material to tie yourself to the middle of the road as the carriage passes is not obvious.

But as far as the decision-making that led to the arrest and detention of Smith and his fellow campaigners is concerned, this 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 resolved the issue in minutes, not resulted in Smith’s detention for 16 hours.

I personally still think there are big problems with the act, and that Keir Starmer’s argument that its rough edges may end up being sanded off thanks to case law is wrong. But as far as these arrests are concerned, that is all a sideshow to the operational failure for one part of the Met to talk to another part of the Met. If on one day you make 64 arrests before the weekend is out and have to release a statement saying you “regret” six of them — that is close to one in 10 of the arrests made — your operational record is, clearly, subpar.

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

Khan is of the belief that because so many of the Met’s national responsibilities take place in London — it is the site of our national parliament, it faces a great number of terror threats, it is where the coronation and other royal events take place and so on — the Met’s dual role is indispensable.

I’m much more inclined to agree with Nick Timothy, one of Theresa May’s former advisers and someone who has done more than most to reform policing in the UK, who has long argued that the Met’s functions need to be split: a local force focused on the day-to-day challenges facing London and reporting to the mayor, and a national force reporting to the home secretary.

One reason for that is my own experience of writing about the Met: essentially every failure — for those of you in need of a refresher, William Wallis wrote a great piece running through the force’s difficulties last summer — prompts a back-and-forth about how it is the home secretary’s fault, or how it is really the mayor of London’s fault. Improvement starts with clear lines of accountability, which the Met’s dual role makes impossible.

How likely is it to happen? Louise Casey’s damning review into the Met’s culture and standards called for the force to be overhauled or broken up, while Keir Starmer has hinted he is open to doing the same.

In practice I think it is unlikely. Although Starmer has direct experience of turning around a police force from his involvement in the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to replace Northern Ireland’s troubled Royal Ulster Constabulary, if Labour gets into office its big political challenge is going to be immigration and asylum. I think it is unlikely that whoever is home secretary is going to force through a reform that Khan, a Labour mayor, does not also back, or that they will have the bandwidth to do so. (Also, even though they will have a Labour mayor, it will still be in the Labour home secretary’s interest to be able to blur who exactly is on the hook for the Met’s shortcomings.)

On the Conservative side, the energy and thought has gone out of this issue since Theresa May left office and I can’t see it coming back any time soon. I hoped at the time of the Casey review that it presented Rishi Sunak with an opportunity to do something of note on police reform. He had an opposition leader who was on side, a serious independent report to draw on, and a great deal of expertise and thought from his own side to call on. He opted not to. If the Conservatives go into opposition, they will surely go for the sugar rush of simply criticising the government rather than reimagining the serious reform proposals that they had under David Cameron.

I think it is much more likely that the Public Order Act is not going to survive a change of government: whatever Keir Starmer says, precisely because a Labour government is rapidly going to end up at odds with its liberal wing over migration, I think simply to keep the party and his government from serious division he will have to revisit the act. That impetus doubles if he ends up relying on the Liberal Democrats to pass legislation.

Now try this

Here’s a rather sweet story: a tweet a Twitter user glorying under a, shall we say, unusual pseudonym has sent This Is How You Lose The Time War, a wonderful epistolary novella about two rival spies fighting a war across time and space, has gone viral and powered the book right back up the bestseller lists.

Having reviewed it at the time for The Big Issue, one reason why the tweet has done so well, I think, is that it is a charming and clever story about forbidden love in a dictatorship that it is hard not to like. I devoured it in a single sitting, and I’m still annoyed that I don’t think my review conveyed how much I enjoyed it at all. (That said, James Lovegrove, reviewing it for the FT, didn’t care for it as much as I did.)

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

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