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How far will the Met go to please its customers?

August 23, 2013 by Martin Hoscik

A police surveillance picture showing Jenny Jones making off with the loot?
A police surveillance picture showing Jenny Jones making off with the loot?
Like most public services, the modern day Metropolitan Police places huge emphasis on customer satisfaction, so Scotland Yard will be disappointed to read recent unhappy Tweets by Assembly Member Jenny Jones.

Jones, the anti-establishment rebel soon to be joining the House of Lords, has long been heard to speculate with unconcealed relish about the contents of her Met Special Branch file.

Call transcripts, covert surveillance shots, lists of known, dangerous and subversive contacts and even blueprints for her home might all lurk within a folder with her name on it.

So keen is Jones on her imagined status as Met’s most watched subversive that she was left visibly crestfallen by a suggestion from Met Deputy Commissioner Craig Mackey that such a file might not exist and, even if it did, it wasn’t racy enough to have been brought to his attention.

It seems he wasn’t far off the truth.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, the Met has forwarded Jones a copy of her file. Sadly the results have left her feeling pretty underwhelmed and a lot less surveilled than she expected.

According to a clearly miffed Jones, the rather thin file contained “Just a collection of entries re speeches I made in Traf Sq & my own twitter comments.”

Hardly the sort of stuff to get you detained at the airport for nine hours, which is probably fitting for someone on the cusp of an Ermine-clad future.

But with the Met’s commitment to customer satisfaction, I can’t help wondering whether the very gentlemanly Mackey, on discovering no file exists and mindful of Jenny’s disappointment at such a suggestion, might not have copied and pasted a few dates from Google, grabbed some quotes from Twitter, and shoved them in a manilla folder?

Should the Greens try and test this theory by making a similar access request on behalf of their second Assembly Member, Darren Johnson, can I suggest Mr Mackey includes this picture in the bundle he sends back?

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