We are now left in a position where the only person arrested as a result of this incident is not the politician who abused the police but the officer who allegedly put the incident into the public domain. Could the commissioner be trying too hard to keep his political masters sweet while throwing one of his officers to the wolves? This, unhappily, will be the shape of things to come in the light of Lord Justice Leveson’s perverse proposal that all relations between the police and press should be put on a formal footing, that there should be an end to off-the-record briefings and that “whistle-blowers” should contact not the media but a “hotline”. If a mechanism was being designed to ensure that embarrassing or even illegal actions by the police or other public servants never reached the public domain, it would look something like this. The Andrew Mitchell case is turning from a story of a politician’s verbal incontinence into something altogether more sinister.