Senior Met Police officer hits back at Braverman in Palestine protest row

A Met Police chief appeared to hit back at Suella Braverman’s meddling over this weekend’s March for Palestine protest, saying the force is “very clear” about its operational independence.

Speaking at a London Assembly policing meeting yesterday, assistant commissioner for Met operations Louisa Rolfe said officers were focused on “upholding the law” after being asked whether the comments of “some politicians” were making their jobs harder.

The meeting came after home secretary Suella Braverman had ramped up pressure on Met commissioner Mark Rowley to ban this weekend’s protest, which falls on Armistice Day, controversially labelling it a “hate march” and a display of “thuggish intimidation and extremism”.

Shortly after Rolfe’s comments were made, Rishi Sunak met with Rowley, leading the prime minister to say the protest would be going ahead as planned. But Braverman then broke rank and wrote a hugely inflammatory op-ed in The Times, accusing police of having “double standards” when it comes to protests. Sunak, who did not sign off on the piece, is now under increasing pressure to sack his home secretary.

Asked by Labour member Unmesh Desai whether the rhetoric of some politicians was making life harder for the Met, Rolfe said: “I think we are really clear about our role. And of course this is a situation that will be highly charged – people will have very strong views and strong feelings – but our focus is on the law and the facts in front of us, and our duty to protect victims of crime is very, very clear to us.

“Policing is a profession that will always be – because of the nature of our role and our job to ensure that we keep the peace and that we protect communities and we respond to crime – a subject of debate and contention but we are very clear of our operational independence and our focus on uploading the law and responding to the law.”

Braverman and Sunak had claimed this weekend’s protest could risk disorder at the Cenotaph in central London, even though the march is in a different part of the capital.

Former senior police officer Neil Basu, who himself was an assistant commissioner at the Met, said yesterday that ministers’ interventions signalled “the end of operational independence in policing” and said they were on the verge of acting unconstitutionally.