Toffs and plebs

So finally Andrew Mitchell has been forced to do the decent thing and resign. In his place comes Eton-educated millionaire Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th baronet - clearly a man of the people.

It was a quick return for Young who was sacked by David Cameron in the September reshuffle.

You have to wonder at the choice. Young is perhaps best known for saying: "The homeless are what you step over when you come out of the opera."

Like his chief whip predecessor he is also a cyclist, indeed he was once nicknamed the Bicycling Baronet.

You might question his judgement. Along with his young children, he once appeared with Jimmy Savile on a British Rail poster promoting the transport of bicycles by rail.

The poster was still on his website last week - I think it's gone now.

Good news is he does have some real experience of how the police work.

He got it in 1987 when he ran into a motorway barrier and kept going until stopped by police.

He was arrested and eventually banned for drunk driving. That's when he became the Bicycling Baronet.

The fact that it took Cameron weeks and weeks to get Andrew Mitchell to go is something the police will take a long time to forgive and forget.

That hostility was notable at the Tory conference in Birmingham, where an officer was seen sporting some fetching new cufflinks - one blue with the word "TOFF," the other red with the legend "PLEB."

Although the cufflinks are a bit of a joke they are actually the outward symbol of a lot of bad feeling between the police and our Tory government, prompted by what has become known as the Gate-Gate affair.

The anger at Mitchell would not have exploded as it did if it didn't take place against a backdrop of unpopular policies - reducing police wages, undermining their job security and selling off the juicy bits of the police service to private companies, most of which donate generously to the Tory Party.

The Gate-Gate tale is well known. Last month Mitchell was threatened with arrest after he verbally abused police officers who stopped him leaving Downing Street by the main vehicle gate.

They directed cyclist Mitchell and his bike to the pedestrian and cycle exit.

Mitchell, it seems, exploded with rage. He reportedly told the officers: "Best you learn your fucking place. You don't run this fucking government... you're fucking plebs."

Mitchell apparently went on to threaten to have the police officer sacked. He allegedly told one armed constable: "I'll have your fucking job for this."

Mitchell later admitted that he "did not treat the police with the respect they deserved" but denied using the words "pleb" and "moron." He claimed to have said: "You guys are supposed to fucking help us."

So who was Andrew Mitchell? Did he have a reputation for losing his temper? Or for telling the truth?

Let's look at his character.

A posh boy, he went to Rugby not Eton, where his nickname was "thrasher" - a clue there perhaps?

He was the son of another Tory MP and like a good few other Tories he is a millionaire ex-banker.

In 2008 in Rwanda in another public loss of temper Mitchell verbally abused a young journalist named Lucy Kinder who had dared to pen a critical article.

He told a friend his aides were "threatening her with physical violence and I can't say I blame them."

In the MPs' expenses scandal Mitchell attracted media attention by claiming among other things for a 45p glue stick.

In 2010 both the Sunday Times and the Guardian claimed that Mitchell had pressed the Foreign Office and parliamentary colleagues to lobby Ghana for the lifting of a trading ban on a cocoa company which had been a repeated donor to Mitchell's office and to the Conservative Party.

In 2006 Mitchell invested funds in privately owned firms implicated in a tax avoidance scheme.

The Daily Telegraph claimed that the company took the lease on a department store building in central London for £65.1 million and sold it a month later for just over £65,000, thus avoiding stamp duty.

Mitchell apologised for the Downing Street incident but continued to deny that he had called the police "fucking plebs."

Police Federation of England and Wales chairman Paul McKeever stated: "It is hard to fathom how someone who holds the police in such contempt could be allowed to hold a public office.

"Mr Mitchell's half-hearted apology for the comments made whilst leaving Downing Street will do little to build bridges with the police."

A 40-minute meeting in Mitchell's Sutton Coldfield constituency which was designed to clear the air ended disastrously with the police reacting furiously when Mitchell declined to accept the truth of their account of the Downing Street confrontation.

Despite all this Cameron and the Tories were still prepared to risk a confrontation with the Police Federation.

Was it because Cameron believed that the federation, which is running a campaign against government police cuts, was behaving like a trade union?

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling certainly thought so.

He became the second senior Cabinet minister to accuse the federation of taking advantage of the incident.

Grant Shapps, the new Conservative Party chairman, said much the same thing.

Some police officers are beginning to wish the federation was a bit more like a militant trade union - more willing to fight the Tory attacks on their working conditions.

As previously noted in the Morning Star Cameron has a long history of attempting to undermine police working conditions.

I'm not referring to his run-in with the Oxford constabulary in a Bullingdon Club incident during his university days but his career-long campaign to reduce police pay, conditions of service, pensions and officer numbers.

Cameron's aim has always been a reduced police force with as much police work as possible being hived off to the Tories' mates, private companies like G4S.

Now David Cameron has called for a new "tough but intelligent" approach to law and order.

He is desperately trying to find a middle ground between Tories who call for tougher sentencing and others who want to see more rehabilitation of offenders.

Ken Clarke, accused of being soft on sentencing, was sacked. In his place came the hard-line Grayling.

Grayling is expected to increase the use of payment by results for private prison companies like G4S if they rehabilitate offenders.

There will be a new offence of possession of an illegal firearm with intent to supply, carrying a maximum life sentence.

There are, surprise surprise, no plans to come down hard on those who take a first-class train seat with a second-class ticket.

Playing the law-and-order card is a traditional tactic of the Tory right.

But if the police are on the receiving end of the same attacks on pay and professionalism as the rest of the public sector they may no longer want to do the government's dirty work.