spinning damian green

With everyone briefing everyone else, here's a summary of the spin.

Senior Tories - i.e. Green's and Cameron's offices - are briefing that the police accused Green of "grooming" Christopher Galley in the hope that it would provoke an incriminating response. The attempt to entrap proves that the arrest was a politically-inspired witch-hunt based on “flimsy and trivial” grounds.

Sources "close to the investigation" - i.e. the detectives working the case - claim that Green was not merely "inducing" or persuading Galley to leak documents but may have set him specific tasks, suggesting more detailed allegations yet to emerge.

The Tories claim the case concerns 4 stories; the police say it's something more like 20 leaked documents. The Times helpfully fills in some of those blanks:

Other Home Office leaks being investigated are: the complete version of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report on the future of policing in February; the information that a disc containing details of 4,000 Dutch offenders that had been sent to Britain had been lost for a year; and news of the loss of data on thousands of prolific offenders.

The Telegraph helpfully describes the law criminalising misconduct in public office as "archaic" and - most revealingly - reports that the Tories have decided to spin against Galley in order to minimise his Tory credentials:

Detectives are believed to suspect that Mr Green may have decided to effectively keep Mr Galley in the Home Office as a Conservative “agent”. However, this is firmly denied by senior Conservatives who claim that he was not offered a job and is a “slightly fragile character”.

An indirect slur against someone's mental health? If the law is archaic, that strategy is so traditional as to be prehistoric.