Last meeting before the summer break of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Deputy Commissioner Blair comes up for a chat with me beforehand to thank me for understanding the ‘agonising’ decisions the police have to make to catch a rapist in South London by making black men between 25 and 40 ‘voluntarily’ give a DNA sample. That will go on as an issue way beyond Operation Minstead – the issues around DNA databases and discrimination are going to get more frequent and more difficult in my view. How much information should the government or its agencies be able to force people to hand over, and what should be permissible to do with that information and by who?

There is a long debate at the meeting about the use of police cells to hold illegal immigrants. This causes huge problems as there are too few cells and if they are full of immigrants rather than criminals – there is nowhere for criminals to go.

The MPA (or rather Labour) have avoided coming to a decision so far on who should be their “link member” for Haringey. To recap – for the first four years, I had been exiled from Haringey because Labour (who chair the MPA) wanted to keep me out of Haringey in case it was to their political disadvantage for me to be on my home patch. All the other members are enabled to link with their home patch – partly for their convenience but also because of local knowledge. For the first term of office there was a valid reason why Nicky Gavron (who was the Enfield Haringey London Assembly member and lives in Haringey herself) had as good a claim to Haringey as I. But she’s no longer the Enfield Haringey member, and her replacement doesn’t live in Haringey.

But of course just because Labour insists on its own members having their own local patch, doesn’t mean they won’t try to impose different standards on other people! It’s just this sort of silly pettiness that turns people off politics.