That’d make a great title for a tv drama, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not a story, it’s true.You’ll understand why I harki back to the tv drama of yesteryear when you read it.
Britons of a similar vintage to me will remember fondly the crop of tv conspiracy thrillers of the late seventies and eighties. when it was a given that the police and security services had their own hidden aganda.
Edge of Darkness is the classic example, but most dramas had common elements: bent coppers and/or corrupt government, an average joe or jane or journo caught up in bewildering events beyond their control (generally terroristic or nuclear but ocasionally environmental), a massive internal military-industrial conspiracy, a state within the state, is gradually exposed by the hero or heroine who then endis up dead, assassinated by the state within the state within the state.
This was before focus-group mandated happy endings, obviously.
The quality of British thriller series has much reduced since. Now they give us Paul Smith mannequins striding about the Heals catalogue in clever lighting, torturing each other for no apparent reason other than for the fun of it, or 70s retro shows which portray the time’s clothes and casual violence accurately but ignore the justified paranoia of the times. All Sweeney and no Smiley, a circus not The Circus.
Odd that. Paranoia about state shenanigans was as prevalent then as it is now.
When it’s a running joke on a mainstream comedy like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin that shady rightwing ex-army cabals plot cosily away in the shires (albeit with constant cockups on the catering front). then conspiracy and spying is an accepted part of life. Even such a weaselly milquetoast as Justice Minister Jack Straw was considered a subversive and spied on the ’70s. Spying on ‘subversives’ is all the rage again – but do we see it on tv?
Imagine what a screenplay the ThePress Gazette story.would make…
Milton Keynes Citizen journalist Sally Murrer today described the revelations about the bugging of MP Sadiq Khan as the missing piece in the jigsaw about her case.
Murrer has been at the centre of a huge police inquiry since May last year when she was accused of “aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office”. Her co-defendant – the policeman accused of illegally giving her stories – is Mark Kearney, the Thames Valley Police officer who this week revealed he had twice been ordered to bug the phone of MP Sadiq Khan in Woodhill Prison in 2005 and 2006.
Murrer, a part time journalist and mother of three, has herself been bugged and tracked by police and been locked up twice during questioning – once for 30 hours.
She now feels that fear on the part of the police that her friend Kearney was going to blow the whistle on the bugging of Khan may explain the huge investigation into them both under the “misconduct in a public office” charge.
She said today: “I think this is the missing part of the jigsaw that I’ve been searching for eight months now. During the whole investigation I have wondered what it is I was supposed to have done.”
Average Jane journo, check. Bewildering, unwarranted events, check…
The police allege that Kearney illegally gave Murrer details of various stories. She says the stories they have referred to have all involved relatively ordinary crimes, the details of which she says she knew about from other sources anyway.
Now she believes the current charges she faces – and for which she is due to stand trial next year – may stem from the revelations that Kearney was involved in the bugging of Khan.
She said: “I clearly remember him saying in May 2005 and June 2006 – ‘they’d made me do something illegal’ and I kept asking him what it was.
“He said it was something to do with the bugging of an MP. When it came up again he said he was losing sleep about this, and said something about the Wilson Law.
“He now says that towards the end of 2006 everything was getting too much and the one thing that was stressing him out was this.”
Bent coppers, check. Shady doings, check…
She believes that it would have been obvious to colleagues at Thames Valley Police that Kearney was becoming increasingly agitated about the bugging episode – and that there was a risk he would blow the whistle.
Murrer said it was around this time that the investigation into her and Kearney – code-named Operation Plaid – began.
She said: “It dawned on me yesterday that this may be the missing piece of the jigsaw. They tried to discredit the whistleblower and the journalist they thought he was going to blow the whistle to and destroy the story that way.
“It seems like a huge hammer to smash a very small nut and I think this could be one of the biggest cover-ups this country has ever seen. They were trying to ruin him, destroying me in the process.
“The way I was treated it felt like they wanted to crack me and stop me writing anything ever again – they nearly did, I was a gibbering wreck for a while.”
Murrer is due to appear at court again next week for a plea and directions hearing and believes her full trial may still be a year away.
Diverting as it is to allow myself the conceit of lreading this story as though it were tv drama, these are real lives and real people.
Murrer’s life has been made hell. and she’s a relatively minor character in the overall conspiracy. The ful scale of routine spying, intimidation and harassment by the police and security services, is yet to be revealed. Are there other Murrers languishing in British jails or held under control orders? We just don’t know.
Mind you, in the seventies or eighties we may have never heard Murrer’s story at all, because those concerned would’ve met with an unfortunate accident before they could’ve typed out heir story and got it to a newspaper. Thank goodness for modern communications.
The internet notwithstanding, have we moved on from the seventies at all? Like then, the same fundamentals of liberty and governance are still at stake and the apparatus of state security runs rampant and unchecked. Unlike then, the shady doings of the deep state don’t get much serious coverage on TV, dramatic or otherwise. Technology is such that it is now virtually impossible to check rampant spying. and the laws so written that any attempt to do so is in itself an offence.
On the whole I’d say we trust government about as much now as we did thirty or so years ago.. The difference then is we thought we could do something about it. Now we know we can’t.
