‘Not at all,’ said the King. ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger – and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he’s happy.’ (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)

On Friday I was woken to an urgent message from a friend in Australia about the arrest of my old flatmate Damian Green, now a Conservative MP and Shadow Immigration Minister. He had been arrested by an anti-terror police squad, who the Daily Mail in its headline characterized as ‘Terror police’. The alleged offence was that of leaking confidential documents. I have no idea whether anything worse was in question, but according to the Daily Mail, the leaked information included a memo that ‘an illegal immigrant had been working in the House of Commons as a cleaner’ and another that ‘suggested a cover-up by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of a massive Government blunder over thousands of illegal immigrants cleared to work in sensitive Whitehall security jobs’.