Guardian must produce the Boris surveillance files

As the sofa wine stain story broke yesterday, as early as dawn it became clear that the perpetrators – the Guardian newspaper and  hostile left-wing neighbours of Boris Johnson, were deeply compromised. Claiming to be concerned for the couple’s welfare, Tom Penn called the police. Fair enough. He claims to have knocked at his neighbours’ door – for which there is of course no evidence. Now if Penn were genuinely concerned for the couple’s welfare, and his story were true, the police having confirmed that nothing was amiss, the sofa wine stain spat having fizzled out, he would have shut up and that would have been the end of the matter.

However, Penn and his American partner Eve Leigh (and I really hope her immigration credentials are in order or poor Penn will have to marry her) were less concerned with their neighbours’ welfare than with damaging them in any way they could. Penn handed over a surveillance recording he had made to the Guardian, which ran the sofa wine stain story.

Boris and Carrie have already been subject of a campaign of harassment and intimidation in their home with flyers (pictured below) plastered around the building and on vehicles outside. It is not known whether Penn and Leigh are responsible for these.

We also don’t know how the recording was made. In a statement to the Guardian, Penn claims “I went inside my own home, closed the door, and pressed record on the voice memos app on my phone.” If his claims that the recording in which the words of a heated conversation can be heard clearly was made in this way, it is extraordinary. Until we have the audio file to analyse, the veracity of Penn’s claim cannot be conformed. It is possible that the hostile neighbours made the recording using professional mics (they are theatre people, after all) fixed onto/into the party wall or floor – and that the clip heard by the Guardian was just an out-take from a comprehensive series of surveillance recordings. Until we have access to the audio file we simply don’t know.

Boris Johnson is a terrorist target and an MP and ex-cabinet minister. The police must surely now determine whether he was being bugged by his hostile neighbours – and crucially, whether Penn and Leigh have breached s.58 of the 2000 Terrorism Act -

Collection of information.

(1) A person commits an offence if—

(a) he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a         person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or

(b) he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind.

Then there is also the person or persons behind these leaflets – were they printed or made on an employer’s colour copier?

Britain is neither in thrall to the Stasi or the Gestapo and their gangs of block and neighbourhood informants. Penn and Leigh committed an unforgivable breach of privacy at the very least, and possible criminal offences at worst. This is not an end to the matter.