Reality check for David Davis on liberty

David Davis may think CCTV a gross infringement of liberty. Luke Akehurst offers a timely reality check from Hackney's housing estates.

Davis gambles to take revenge on Cameron

The idea that David Davis's self-imposed by-election in a Tory seat that Labour could never expect to win will provide some sort of public verdict on the 42-days decision is utterly ludicrous. Given that the Lib Dems will apparently not run, it is grandstanding of the highest order by Davis. The idea that six rather than four weeks is a fundamentally different order of loss of liberty is quite absurd. What the new law does allow, with serious safeguards, is some flexibility for the police in the most serious terrorist cases.

If Davis gets a good result, as must be probable given constituency politics, Cameron and those in the shadow cabinet like Michael Gove who have some understanding about the seriousness of the contemporary terrorist threat will be the losers as the shadow home secretary will become insufferable. He will have got his revenge for his leadership election loss and a payback on other issues like grammar schools where Davis has sniffed a sellout. But if he loses, can we expect a Tory u-turn on the 42 days issue?

Anatomy of a 'gaffe' in today's press

Jacqui Smith's advisers probably shouldn't have mentioned her trip to a Peckham kebab shop, given that she would have had her protection officer with her. But the idea that it is a gaffe for a woman to say that she would not walk about a strange inner city area alone at midnight (although she happily does so in areas she knows) - even if she does happen to be Home Secretary, albeit the latest Labour one to be presiding over falling crime levels - tells us a lot more about the fatuousness of the British press and our main Opposition party than it does about Jacqui Smith. Would it have been better had Ms Smith declared (presumably to widespread derision) that, of course, she would happily walk the alley ways and back streets of Hackney late at night? And perhaps rent-a-quote David Davis, who ought to have more sense than to dub an honest response 'shameful', could explain to us in which halcyon age it was 'safe' for a woman to do so? Of course, there will be lots of fearless lone women walking the back alleys of London through the night once the Tories are in power. Just as they did in the 1980s, didn't they?