The Minister’s Wife doesn’t understand why the Minister is so trenchantly cynical about the police.

The Minister’s Wife grew up in the Thames Valley in the late 70s and 80s.

The Minister grew up at the same time in the north of the East Midlands.

While the Minister’s Wife tends to see policemen as brave people who do a job that neither she nor I would want to do and of whom you can safely ask the time before they tell you, pat you on the head and send you on your way with a “Mind how you go,” I tend to see a bunch of overgrown schoolboys who were not fit enough to join the Army in pursuit of the violence- and speed- related adrenaline rushes that seem to sustain them, violence and speed that would be unlawful if performed by a person without a warrant card.

Having read Nineteen Eighty-Four at the age of 11, the Minister was soon afterwards confronted by a year-long nightly spectacle on the local news of policemen assaulting workers daring to stand up for job security; of mounted policemen charging at pickets; of men in full riot gear – shields and batons flailing – laying into men in t-shirts and jeans; of arrogant southerners on triple time standing at roundabouts preventing ordinary and law-abiding northerners from driving where they wanted to go; and of women dragged along the ground and thrown into the back of police vans for the “crime” of shouting the word “scab”.

It made something of an impression on the Young Minister.

(And if you think I exaggerate, I have eight DVDs at home of news and documentary footage from the miner’s strike detailing all of the above and more.)

My subsequent direct contact with the police has been mercifully limited: three burglaries, one instance of criminal damage and a couple of RTA-related matters in a personal capacity and one fraud investigation in a professional capacity.  (Perhaps I should point out that I was not the perpetrator of any of the aforementioned incidents.)  I also met a couple of Chief Constables when they came to speak at my university.

Most of the police officers I met as a consequence were relatively well-intentioned but not terribly bright; a few were downright lazy and incompetent.  One of the Chief Constables and one Detective Constable were genuinely impressive individuals.

All apart from the Chief Constables seemed very, very tired.  Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that not one person has been prosecuted for any of the above crimes.

So when miscarriage of justice followed miscarriage of justice through the 1990s thanks to police conspiracies or improperly-obtained confessions, I was angered but not shocked.  When a judge solemnly pronounced that the capital’s police force was “institutionally racist”, I shrugged and wondered since when stating the bleedin’ obvious became newsworthy.  When police officers lied about the circumstances of the death of Jean-Charles de Menezes and literally got away with murder, I was furious but not surprised.

And now it has emerged once again that a policeman clad in riot gear assaulted an innocent man in a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and his buddies then lied about it, I barely raise an eyebrow.  Where the chattering classes are appalled that something like this could possibly happen on the streets of Britain in broad daylight and before hundreds of witnesses, some of us have seen every fucking frame of this film before, over and over again.

The police still do a job I wouldn’t want to do but that’s at least in part because I couldn’t possibly stomach working alongside some of the disgraceful excuses for human beings that make up the force.

Under Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian has become a sad parody of the once-great newspaper it was.  It is now only rarely worth the cover price.  Today is one of those days.  Its investigatory and campaigning work in the week since Ian Tomlinson died has been commendable.

Let’s just hope the police have better luck in identifying and apprehending the policeman who assaulted Mr. Tomlinson shortly before he died last Wednesday than they did in catching the fraudsters who diddled my employers out of £800,000 last year or the burglar who ran off with the Minister’s Wife’s camera a year earlier.