Thursday, April 09, 2009

Livingstone defends Quick - Quick Resigns

Ken Livingstone was on Newsnight last night defending Bob Quick. His line was that it was a trivial mistake and that Quick was such an asset in his current role that we could not afford to lose him. This is twaddle. If a junior officer had breached security to the point that a major operation risked compromise then they would have been disciplined, probably severely. There cannot be one rule for the troops and another for the boss. This is particularly important for things like information security, which depend absolutely on people doing the right thing day in and day out. Letting Quick off would be the same as saying that the rules don't matter, or they don't matter if you are a friend of Ken. Fortunatley, Ken isn't running the show any more and Boris had a very different attitude. In fact Livingstone was the only talking head to try and defend Quick, not surprising when you remember Quick sending 20 anti-terror police into parliament without a warrant. That disgrace alienated politicians across the political spectrum, and it hasn't yielded up anything in the way of a prosecution either. An uncharitable explanation would be that Quick was after the top job in the met and hoped to impress the Home Secretary by being tough on Tories. Well, we don't need another political copper thanks, and today at least we have one less.

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