MARK ROWLEY is fast becoming a menace to democracy in Britain. The country’s most powerful police officer is daily transgressing the limits — on partisanship, on political interference, on responsibility to all citizens — which have traditionally bounded the public interventions of leading state officials.

Of course, those limits have often been honoured in the breach.  But the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has discarded all appearances of impartiality and, indeed, truthfulness.

It has long been clear that he has a special animus for the Palestine solidarity movement. He has sought to restrict its demonstrations on the most specious grounds and arrest its organisers for entirely peaceful and responsible conduct.

After the most notorious of such crackdowns, on the demonstration in January 2025, Rowley hastened to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which had been pushing for protest curbs, to receive an ovation from them the very next day.

By contrast, he has consistently refused to meet the organisers of the protests. He has been zealous in arresting peaceful objectors to the Palestine Action proscription.

Now he is deploying direct falsehoods in his attempt to rationalise a still more severe crackdown. He has accused the organisers of the huge demonstrations against Israel’s genocide of repeatedly seeking to march past synagogues.

That is a lie, as Rowley knows. The campaign has never sought to march past synagogues nor protest outside them in any way. Had they done so, it would indeed have been a matter of concern.

They have sought to gather outside the BBC as an assembly point, incidentally protesting the state broadcaster’s whitewashing of Israel.

There is a synagogue more than 300 metres away. Neither the synagogue nor people seeking to worship there have ever been beset in any way. Yet its mere presence is sufficient for Rowley to accuse the movement of antisemitism.

No-one can any longer have the slightest faith in even-handed policing of the pro-Palestine marches.

Nor has the commissioner stopped there. He published a lengthy open letter condemning Zack Polanski just days before vital local elections.

It may be that the criticism of the police who arrested the man now charged with the knife attacks in Golders Green and elsewhere was misplaced. Polanski has expressed regret for sharing such a post.

But for a senior police officer to publicly remonstrate with the leader of a democratic party immediately before an election is alarming and has few precedents. If Rowley felt the need to defend his officers’ conduct he could have had a private word with Polanski or issued a general statement on the issue, or both.

Instead he put a copper’s thumb on the democratic scales.

Rowley feels he should choose which parties should prevail in elections, just as he believes he should determine which rights may be exercised and by whom.

Few share that view. “Police state” is a term of political disapprobation for a reason.

The commissioner needs to be stopped in his tracks. We do not need the police arbitrating our politics.

It is therefore past time that we heard from Sadiq Khan on the issue. Rowley is nominally accountable to the London mayor, as well as the Home Office. Mayors have managed to secure the dismissal of commissioners in the past.

Yet Khan has been mute while Rowley has been running his mouth off. The mayor cannot abdicate his responsibilities for democracy and civil rights in London.

Londoners and all those who work in or visit the city can have no confidence in Rowley’s leadership of the Met. In the interests of democracy, Khan needs to step up and send him packing.