Atmospheric Pressure

One of the Vicar of Downing Street's senior chums has voiced concern that the Crown Prosecution Service may be suffering impartiality erosion from the "fevered atmosphere" surrounding his reverence's unofficial privatisation of the honours trade. There is particular concern over the tactics of Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who has apparently put two of his reverence's foundlings under intimidatory pressure. John McTernan, his reverence's political secretary, was "put under particular pressure during a police interview", according to Sources. The tactless treatment of Ruth Turner, who was visited by the best police force in the world at six-thirty in the morning, for all the world like a failed asylum seeker, has also raised constitutional hackles. "We do not live in a banana republic, whatever Assistant Commissioner Yates believes," said one Labour official. The Labour official is certainly correct. We do, after all, have a Queen.

In this atmosphere of dawn arrests and tip-offs to the press by anonymous sources and anonymous Labour officials, Tony's anonymous senior chum is rightly concerned that British justice may not be altogether properly served: "Whichever barrister is landed with this job is going to have to stand up to the political, police and media pressure to launch a prosecution," the senior chum said. Meanwhile, in the absence of any means of exerting pressure on its own account, poor Downing Street has little choice but to wait the matter out.