Dear Andrew Mitchell: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Dear Mr Mitchell,

My facial muscles are getting a bit tired, and it’s all your fault. I’ve been alternating over the last few days between a wry smile and open-mouthed disbelief at the counter-offensive you and your pals have been trying to mount over the whole ‘plebgate’ saga.

The BBC News Channel, and various newspapers, have been featuring prominently the claims, by you and a cadre of your mates, that the recently-disclosed CCTV footage of the incident ‘exonerates’ you. You’ve apparently claimed you were ‘stitched up’ and that the ‘awful, toxic language’ was

hung round my neck in a concerted attempt to toxify the Conservative party and destroy my political career.

while one of your allies has written extensively about the matter, implying that it happened because of a ‘cancer’ of corruption in the police force.

I’m afraid you go too far, and on more than one count.

Evidence and absence

First and foremost, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I’ve watched the CCTV footage, and (and this is where the mouth-opening disbelief tends to take over from the wry smile for a while) I haven’t seen anything that remotely ‘exonerates’ you. The footage has no sound, and neither the necessary angles nor the clarity to allow any lip-reading.

It does not in any way prove that you didn’t say ‘f***ing plebs’ and the rest of it. It does seem to show that there wasn’t a small crowd of onlookers, which undermines the email supposedly from a member of the public that there was. Or at least, that one angle does – for other angles and an outstanding analysis of the footage from other angles, see this blog post by Gracie Samuels, though I warn you, you might not enjoy it.

However, for the moment let’s take the footage you’re clinging to as definitive, for the sake of argument. While it’s very shocking (if true) that a fake email was written by a police officer (whose grammar and spelling you criticise – I trust mine will meet with your lofty standards, even if it is written by a proud pleb), all it proves is that the police went too far in trying to vindicate themselves after you denied using the words. It does not prove that you didn’t say it.

Of course, it doesn’t prove that you did, either. But you’re going far too far by saying, and having your friends say on your behalf, that it exonerates you. It does nothing of the sort.

It still all comes down to claim and counter-claim, and I have to say that I’d generally take the word of even a bent copper over that of a minister from this government – and there is nothing at all to suggest that the police officer at the gate is bent or even mistaken. For you already to be claiming that you’re now exonerated and should have your old job back smacks of desperation, mixed with a good dollop of the very arrogance that makes it so easy for everyone to believe that you did say ‘f***ing pleb’, ‘You think you run the **** country’ and so on.

What adds to my conviction that you almost certainly did say what you’re accused of saying is your absolute, adamantine refusal – in spite of repeated challenges – to say publicly what you did say. You see, if I found myself in your situation and was wrongly accused, I’d make sure everyone knew, word for word, exactly what I did say. This would counterbalance the words I was falsely accused of saying and would give the media something else to chew on and regurgitate instead of the constant repetition of the ‘false’ words as truth. I’d do this as a private individual, and I’d most certainly do it as a politician, if I were such.

Yet you, while admitting in vague terms that you did swear at the police officer, consistently refused to elaborate publicly what else you said – even when asked in Parliament to do so. Parliamentary privilege would have allowed you complete freedom not only to say what you did say without fear of contradiction by the police or media, but even to accuse the police in stinging terms of the ‘stitch-up’. It appears you told a police federation panel that you’d said ‘I thought you were supposed to f***ing help us’, but even when their spokesman didn’t make it clear that you’d explained even that far, you didn’t cry ‘foul’ and didn’t bring out the recording you’d made of the session.

Of course, at that point you didn’t know about the video footage, so perhaps you were worried that these witnesses would turn up and verify that you had said what you were accused of saying. That would be an understandable reason for not vindicating yourself vehemently while you still had the Chief Whip’s job, while you were prepared to tell the police federation (nobody has said you were under oath, as far as I can tell) an edited version of what you said in the hope that it would go away. There might be one, but I can’t think of another scenario that fits the facts.

Toxic Tories

The other way in which you went too far – and here the wry smile starts to predominate again – is in suggesting that this incident ‘toxified’ your party. To that, I would ask you: ‘Can you ‘toxify’ arsenic, or strychnine, or anything else that’s already poisonous?‘

Your party is toxic because of its sustained assault on the most vulnerable in our society while it heaps advantage on the already-privileged; because of its proven links to media and business interests that it then goes on to promote; because of its readiness to demonise anyone as a prelude to stripping them of the little they have, in order to win the support of the foolish and gullible; because of its willingness to lie for the sake of a soundbite; and yes, because of the palpable arrogance of its representatives.

You don’t ‘toxify’ what’s already toxic. Instead, you label it so that no one takes it by mistake. The label doesn’t change what’s in the pot or bottle – it just makes it clearer to everyone what it contains.

That’s all that ‘plebgate’ has done. Whatever the truth about that specific incident, few of us really doubt that most, if not all, of the Tories in Parliament do consider ordinary people plebs or worse. It’s perfectly obvious in the statements your colleagues make in Parliament and elsewhere, in the decisions you take and who suffers from them – and who benefits.

So please, reel yourself and your chums in just a little on the ‘stitched up’ rhetoric. It’s possible someone in the police crossed the line in his/her zeal to vindicate a fellow-officer, but you weren’t ‘stitched up’. You – and your Parliamentary colleagues – have simply been exposed. Shown more clearly for what you are.

That’s a different thing entirely.