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At the Downing Street lobby briefing yesterday the PM’s spokesperson was reluctant to comment directly on the arrest of Graham Linehan. But he did say that Keir Starmer thought the police should be focusing on “antisocial behaviour, shoplifting, street crime, as well as reducing serious violent crimes like knife crime and violence against women”. The Daily Telegraph has interepreted that as an attack on the Met.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, was on the media round this morning and in some respects he adopted the same line. Asked about the arrest, he told Times Radio:

I think the prime minister and the home secretary have been very clear that with the law and order challenges we’ve got in our country, we want to see people being kept safe by policing streets, not just policing tweets.

But Streeting also made a different argument, pointing out that the police were only enforcing laws passed by parliament and that, if MPs felt their actions were excessive, they needed to change the law. He told Times Radio:

One thing I would say, because it’s always easy for people to criticise the police, the police enforce the laws of the land that we as legislators provide. So if we’re not getting the balance right then that’s something that we all have to look at and consider … If the police are enforcing things that we think are a waste of time or a distraction from more important things, that’s on us to sort out.

On the Today programme, about an hour later, Streeting went even further, implying that hate speech laws were too strict. He said they had “unintended consequences” and that MPs were “quite anxious” about how they were being enforced.

He told the programme:

I’m very glad that we live in a country where we come down like a tonne of bricks on racism and discrimination. That is the right thing to do … There have always been legitimate boundaries when it comes to hate speech, which is about protecting others from harm.

Sometimes those boundaries and those lines are blurred, and we are talking shades of grey, rather than black and white. That’s why this is complicated. It’s complicated for legislators, and it is hard for the police sometimes, because they they have to apply the law as it is written, not the law as sometimes it was intended.

And honestly, this is why sometimes when we have debates in parliament, it can be quite tricky when campaigners are saying vote for this clause or that clause, because often people legislate with good intentions, but they also have to be mindful of unintended consequences.

And I think we are all, let’s be honest, quite anxious about some of the cases we’ve seen in the media, or proceed through the courts, of what people have said online where you think, was that really what parliament intended when they passed these laws?

Streeting may have been referring to the Lucy Connolly case, which Nigel Farage is expected to discuss when he testifies on Capitol Hill later.

It was not clear from Streeting’s interview whether the health secretary was reflecting concerns felt more widely in government, or whether he was just freelancing. Quite possibly it was the latter. Streeting is much more inclined than other ministers to actually answer questions in interviews, and say what he thinks. Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper (who as home secretary, unlike Streeting, is actually responsible for law and order policy) have not talked about the need to revise hate speech laws.

But Streeting also has a good feel for where the political debate is heading. If ministers were not thinking about revising hate speech laws, they might be a bit more inclined to have that debate now.