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Public Disorder: Policing

My Lords, may I express my sympathy for the difficulties in which the police found themselves, and my admiration for the way in which, by and large, they handled the event? I have two questions. First, the Statement says that those who wished to leave the area of containment and, "““to leave via Whitehall were able to do so””," but a lot of people in the media have commented that they could not leave. Is there any doubt that the demonstrators who wanted to go down Whitehall to get away from the area of containment could do so? Secondly, I find what happened to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall slightly puzzling. Those of us who were Ministers in Northern Ireland had the benefit of close protection officers who phoned ahead at all times and who would never have got me into that difficulty, and I fail to see why those of us, like me, who were Ministers were better protected than the Royal Family. Something seems to have gone badly wrong.