Vernon Bogdanor is missing the point

Vernon Bogdanor of Oxford University is routinely wheeled out to explain the niceties of the British constitution when that arcane subject hits the headlines, which isn’t often. The Damian Green case has given him a glorious opportunity to display his learning.

Bogdanor’s message to furious MPs and the media is: “Calm down, dears, it’s a storm in a teacup”.

The eminent professor goes on: “The important principle is that MPs – apart from when they’re speaking in the chamber and dealing with constituents’ correspondence – are as subject to the same laws as the rest of us.”

Hasn’t Bogdanor got the wrong end of the stick?

No-one is suggesting that MPs are above the law. The nub of this case is the ludicrously heavy-handed treatment of Green and his family be anti-terrorist squad officers, the suspicion that it is politically motivated – and the fact that the police searched not only his homes and his constituency office but his House of Commons office too.

By arguing that privilege applies only when MPs are speaking in the chamber and when “dealing with constituents’ correspondence”, Bogdanor contradicts his own case.

What does he think was contained in the computers hauled away from Green’s offices if not the details of constituents’ cases, some of them doubtless of a highly sensitive and personal nature? That’s what MPs have on their computers. It’s what they spend half their working lives dealing with.

So even by Bogdanor’s rather pedantic standards, the police have committed an outrageous breach of parliamentary privilege by removing those constituents’ files.  Will people feel so confident about writing to their MPs in future if there is a chance their letters will end up in the local nick?