A sinister new twist in the Mitchell saga Andrew Mitchell, the former Conservative chief whip, swore at police officers at the entrance to Downing Street when they refused to open the main gates to allow him to cycle through. He subsequently admitted that he had used obscene language and "did not treat the police with the respect they deserve." He apologised for his behaviour, which was clearly unbecoming in a Cabinet minister, particularly when directed at public servants whose job is to protect him. Mr Mitchell did not lose his job as a consequence of this ill-mannered performance, though in a more fastidious era he probably would have. Nor was he arrested, though he could have been for using obscene language to a police officer. He resigned from the Government almost a month later because he had lost the confidence of party colleagues who felt that he had not given a full and candid account of what had happened. The rather frenzied public debate over whether he used the word - horror of horrors - "pleb" as opposed to "plod" in this encounter is little more than a semantic point of detail, despite the best efforts of some commentators to see it as the most "toxic" insult a Tory politician could conceivably use. Against this background, it beggars belief that the Metropolitan Police have seen fit to arrest a serving police officer on suspicion of leaking details of the Mitchell incident to the press. At the same time, the Independent Police Complaints Commission has mounted an investigation into the "validity of the officer's claim." Yet, confusingly, Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said yesterday that "the original account of the officers at the scene" as set out in the police log was not in doubt. 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.