A Sky News reporter having his microphone grabbed and dropped to the ground might seem like a trifling story right now, given everything that’s happening in the country. But when the mic-grabber is none other than Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, it’s a different matter. A very different matter. In a democracy, cops don’t treat journalists in such a dismissive, degrading fashion.

It was outside the Cabinet Office that Sir Mark outrageously interfered with the property of a reporter. The man from Sky News asked him if he was going to ‘end two-tier policing’. And instead of answering – or not answering, if he wants to be a big baby about it – Sir Mark yanked Sky’s mic and seemed to push it to the ground. As he then arrogantly strutted to his car, the reporter could be heard saying: ‘Did he just do that?’

Yes, he did. And it was beyond inappropriate. For the most powerful cop in the country to manhandle an instrument of journalism, to try to physically prevent a reporter from recording something, sends a terrible message. Will Sir Mark’s lower-downs now behave likewise? Will they take their cue from the big man and grab and discard the kit of any journalist who asks them a pesky question?

It felt like a mask-off moment. It seemed to reveal a haughty disregard on the part of Sir Mark, and perhaps the Met more broadly, for the right of reporters to interrogate people in power. Rowley didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. His lunging for the mic and his puffed-up demeanour said it all: ‘I’m not speaking to a lowlife like you.’

It was the physicality of the encounter that truly rankled. What if Sir Mark had broken that mic? I can see the global headlines now: ‘Chief British Police Officer Smashes Journalist’s Equipment.’ There was a palpable authoritarian undertone to Sir Mark’s gruff behaviour. It felt like more than exasperation – it felt like intolerance. Intolerance for the freedom of the press to ask questions that make officials feel uncomfortable.

In this case, it seems to have been the reporter’s query about ‘two-tier policing’ that pushed the Met boss over the edge. I’ve noticed an extreme defensiveness on this question. Keir Starmer, too, bristled at the suggestion that cops are treating the current rioting mobs more harshly than they did other recent acts of brutish disorder. It’s a ‘non-issue’, he said. Leftists online are as one with Sir Mark and Sir Keir, furiously denouncing all talk of two-tier policing as a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Is it possible they protest too much? To many it seems at least plausible to ask whether the current riots are being policed and condemned more ferociously than the Harehills riot in Leeds last month was. And didn’t Sir Keir take the knee in the fashion of Black Lives Matter in August 2020 when the BLM protests were at their height? Some on the left described the England riots of 2011, with all their arson and looting and death, as an uprising against austerity. Yet now street violence horrifies them. It all has at least the whiff of a double standard, no?

Regardless, the point is that reporters must have the right to ask such questions, even if they irritate the top dog of the armed wing of the state. In recent years, both the political class and the police have too often been disdainful of press freedom. Yet without that freedom, we’re screwed. Reporters holding officialdom’s feet to the fire is what keeps a nation free and informed. Sir Mark must apologise to Sky News and make it clear that none of his officers should ever meddle with the property or the liberty of a journalist.

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The 'Standing Army' of Police

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