Leading article: competent leadership badly needed

The scandal of the arrest of the Shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, continues to reverberate. Arresting MPs (not to mention raiding their offices in the House of Commons) is no small matter in a democracy. The affair must be treated with the highest seriousness by the Government. Before anything else we need an official statement detailing exactly what ministers knew before the raid went ahead. Otherwise, poisonous suspicions that the police have been used as a political tool will continue to fester.