Tory MP arrested and/or not

One is torn between the pleasure of seeing Tories getting arrested and the suspicion of an incompetent yet dangerously powerful government. The real interest in the story is just what was leaked by taupe in the first place. But we'll never get to know about that, now that the mole has been insulated somewhere by Home Office officials or not. Or sacked or not.

And an amusing, perhaps revealing error, in the BBC report of this nonevent. Repeating the Home Secretary's claim that she herself knew nothing about what was going on, the arrest, the mole, the taps etc. the BBC states " Ms Smith said that she had signed any warrant to approve the bugging of Mr Green."

Now, for consistency's sake, to accord this sentence with the rest of the piece, there should be a "not" before the "any" in that phrase. Otherwise, the indirect speech statement says that any old warrant approving the bugging of Mr.Green would have been signed. A proposition at odds with Smith's claim that she was in the dark about this whole thing - (a lie obviously but a lie which is outside of the text here, at the moment). Presumably the 'not' has been unintentionally left out, because the run of the sentence sounds odd, almost comical. 'I knew nothing about this whole affair but I signed anything to bug that bugger - er- . . . doh!' In that case someone at the BBC is either very slack, it is the weekend after all, or someone is trying to tell us something - that the Home Secretary did know all about this and the government is in a stalinist mood so watch the fuck out. But, on the balance of probabilities, probably. ['not'].

It's interesting to note the furore that this brief arrest has created, when, as 'The Antagonist' pertinently points out, if it was someone of an 'unfashionable' skin colour being nicked, few would even notice let alone bother to get whipped up about it.