Remember that scene outside his Chelsea home when his wife mistook the arresting officers for reporters? A good laugh A fun story. It cannot be anything other than prejudicial to the arrested people, providing millions of newspaper readers and television viewerswith an image of guilt before trial or, in the case of people not yet charged, guilt without trial.For those who indulge in the no-smoke-without-fire view of human nature (the majority), the pictures must seem like conclusive proof that the arrested person has been up to something.Similarly, it was equally grotesque to watch Kevin Maxwell being arrested. We know the form.
But the form we should be questioning in the name of justice and fairness is whether the embarrassing matter of arrest – while innocent and not even charged – should occur in public. Why should a citizen be taken into police custody in the full glare of publicity? Why should a supposedly discreet police operation be turned into a media circus? Pertinently, we also ask: who stands to benefit most from this intrusive behaviour – the “police in co-ordinated nationwide bribes swoop”, or the people pictured and filmed being escorted to cars?It is an outrage that people can be taken into custody in a piece of theatre, scripted, directed and stage-managed by the police, who also happen to be the principal actors. If a person is roused from sleep unexpectedly, ordered to dress immediately, not allowed to wash and shave, and obliged to accompany police to the station “to help us with our inquiries”, how else would he look? We have seen The Bill. Journalists were obviously given not so much a tip-off as a press release about the raid on Grobbelaar’s house.

How else could they have been outside the moment Operation Navajo – the investigation into soccer bribery – swung into action? Grobbelaar, we were told in newspapers the next day, looked tired No wonder. But it hardly takes a moment’s thought to reflect on the reason the footballer Bruce Grobbelaar suffered the indignity of being arrested in front of a media throng on Tuesday morning. The police will deny it. The reporters, photographers and camera operators won’t tell (sorry, we can’t reveal our sources, old boy).

Which is of course why Sinn Fein and the IRA would presumably think very hard before bringing down the best friend they will ever have in the White House. And tonight in the White House, it’s going to be very friendly indeed.. The red-carpet treatment could enrage Unionist hardliners to the extent that they pull the plug on the entire peace process; or worst of all, the IRA could pull the plug on Bill Clinton by resuming the armed struggle, a disaster that would send Anglo-American relations into the ice age and probably destroy his presidency. It may even be claimed that Mr Clinton is actually helping Mr Major, by providing a target for Loyalist fire that would otherwise be aimed straight at the Prime Minister.But everything could go wrong. This time, they argue, he is being rewarded for a ceasefire now seven months old, but is being told that Washington expects swift progress on IRA arms decommissioning.

Of what other white ethnic group, of what other issue, can that be said?Mr Clinton is, however, taking a huge gamble on Adams the Peacemaker. The Americans may maintain that the first visa they granted Mr Adams enabled him to discover first-hand that the mainstream Irish lobby, a crucial source of money and moral support, was weary of the conflict – and provided him with the clout to deliver that home truth to his colleagues. And that approval could be worth its political weight in gold. The 40 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry are anything but a monolithic electoral block, and half of them may be of Protestant origin But on Northern Ireland they support him overwhelmingly. Unlike their British counterparts, American papers do not groan under massive analyses of the demise of the special relationship – indeed, Mr Clinton’s Irish policy is generally approved. The next day, Mr Clinton ordered the visa be granted.And if the Irish vote was important to Candidate Clinton in 1992, it may be no less important in his battle for re-election now – not so much to stifle any challenge for the Democratic nomination, but to appeal to the middle-of-the-road white voters, many of them “Reagan Democrats” who voted Republican in the 1980s before returning to Mr Clinton four years ago.As a news story in the US, the Gerry Adams affair is nothing special, usually confined to the inside pages. Over lunch that day in a Washington hotel, Sir Patrick sounded confident to reporters that Mr Adams would not be allowed to raise funds.

An hour or two later, Senator Dodd made the case for Mr Adams during a round of golf with the President. The fate of Mr Adams’s fundraising mission was largely settled in the space of a few hours on 7 March. Another sibling, Jean Kennedy Smith, is the US ambassador in Dublin.And this is to reckon without Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, long an activist in Irish matters and now chairman of the Democratic party, de facto head of Mr Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign and one of the President’s closest political confidants. Hence his natural alignment with Teddy Kennedy, a long- standing leader of the Irish-American lobby, whose former foreign policy aide Nancy Soderberg is now at the White House shaping Irish policy from a senior post in the National Security Council. An Irish connection, moreover, cements Mr Clinton’s association with the Kennedys, that most magical of American political names, carried by a President on whom Bill Clinton has consciously modelled himself.