News that anti-terror officers trawled Damian Green MP’s personal emails for information, including details of Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, has further highlighted the government’s worrying attitude to civil liberties, says
Chris Huhne MP

The investigation into Home Office leaks and the subsequent arrest of the Conservative MP Damian Green has been a shambles from start to finish. It has wasted police time, unnecessarily tied up prosecutors, and created a constitutional squall because of the searching of an MP’s office — and all for a matter that we now know should have been handled as an internal civil service disciplinary case.

Jacqui Smith above all emerges from the affair more beleaguered than ever. Her decision to allow the case to be referred to the police demonstrates poor judgement, and is just one of a number of mistakes on civil liberties issues that she has made recently.

Back in June 2008, she doggedly stuck to proposals for pre-charge detention to be increased from 28 to 42 days. Whilst the Commons passed the Bill by slimmest of majorities, largely thanks to incentives offered to the DUP, the government were forced into an embarrassing climb down after the proposals were crushed by the unelected Lords.

More recently was yet another retreat, with sensible provisions for directly elected police authorities being dropped from the green paper once the Policing and Crime Bill was finally introduced, due to pressure from local authorities.

And so to the Damian Green affair. Jacqui Smith knew and approved of the decision to call in the police to investigate the leaks, seemingly unaware of the political sensitivity of the issue, and of the wider ramifications for the workings of parliament and opposition parties –– a political decision which has hugely backfired in the wake of the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute Damian Green or Christopher Galley.

More astonishing still is that the decision to search and arrest Damian Green was taken without consultation with Ministers. Senior civil servants appear to have confused their own embarrassment with national security and –– as the Home Affairs Select Committee found –– misled the police into believing that national security was involved. The Director of Public Prosecutions made it perfectly clear on Thursday that it was not.

Leaking is, sadly, almost inevitable in the current political climate. The formal mechanisms for holding the government to account have been so weakened under New Labour that these informal channels are often the only option available. And now even this channel is being blocked –– by exaggerated claims of national security threats and spurious police investigations where even prominent civil liberties activists such as Shami Chakrabati are implicated.. These are the actions of a government more concerned with vilifying and silencing those who expose their weakness than with trying to address it themselves.

Chris Huhne is Member of Parliament for Eastleigh and Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for the Home Department.