ONCE again, proceedings at Cleveland Police leave the public with the nagging feeling that something is not quite right.

The public will never be able to be more specific because, unless there is a change of heart by the police authority, they will never be allowed to know the full facts.

The Operation Diamond inquiry was commissioned by a public body, paid for by the public purse and investigated a matter of immense public interest: whether a chief constable - a chief constable, no less - was responsible for starting rumours about a female police clerk's affair with the most high-profile policeman in the country.

But the findings of that inquiry, the response to those findings and the deliberations of the members of the police authority - members who are entrusted by the public to represent them - shall never be known because Friday's meeting will be held in private.

And so the public will never know whether another expensive inquiry, as is already being mooted, is justified. (That this would be an inquiry into an inquiry which was inquiring into part of a larger inquiry suggests something of the mess that is Operation Lancet.)

While we accept that sensitive personnel matters, and sensitive evidence, should be discussed in private, there is nothing to stop those discussions beginning in public. Indeed, it is in the interests of all concerned - especially the chief constable, who has talked in the past of his frustrations at not being able to get a fair hearing - for as much as possible being held in public.

But the police authority wants them in private. Indeed yesterday, the authority told The Northern Echo, and other media organisations, not to publish articles about the meeting until after it has been held. It wants a private inquiry, discussed in private, decided in private.

If that is allowed to happen - especially as the public does know via a possibly selective leak that the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire specifically recommends that the Chief Constable of Cleveland "should be held culpable for abuse of authority and breach of confidence" - then it will be understandable if the public feels that something is not quite right