BY the time Robert Anderson wrote his ‘straining the law’ memo in 1898, extra-legality had already been long established as a defining feature of British political policing, as several official documents attest. Thus, as early as 1881, following a police raid on Johann Most's printing shop in the wake of his arrest for incitement to murder, the Director of Public Prosecutions, A. K. Stephenson, candidly observed in a memo to the Home Office how ‘the police often necessarily in the proper discharge of their duties commit acts which are said to be illegal, inasmuch as there may be no statutable authority for such acts’.

As we have seen, extra-legal practices continued throughout the 1880s, becoming firmly established during Edward Jenkinson's tenure as (unofficial) chief spymaster at the Home Office. Jenkinson took charge of an intricate network of informers stretching on both sides of the Atlantic, using it to upset the activities of the Clan na Gael and other American Fenian organizations. On several occasions, this more than likely involved the use of agents provocateurs (Red Jim McDermott, Daniel O’Neill), arguably without the full knowledge of the Home Office or Scotland Yard, but with the cooperation of RIC and provincial police chiefs (the help lent by Chief Constable Joseph Farndale in the 1884 arrests of John Daly and James Egan being a case in point). The rivalries generated within the political police hierarchy, partly by Jenkinson's style and personality, led to the latter's downfall and the abandonment of his particular model of intelligence gathering, but not to the abandonment of extra-legality.

As the events surrounding the abortive Jubilee Plot of 1887 and the Bloody Sunday riot of the same year show, the willingness of Jenkinson's former rivals to act in an extra-legal manner – whether by colluding with Fenian conspirators in order to avoid the public airing of ‘embarrassing’ information or by unilaterally curtailing rights of assembly and free speech – was beyond doubt. Such methods were also at play in less extraordinary cases, as attested by Charles Warren's admission in late 1888 that ‘we have in times past done something [i.e. illegal house raids] on a very small scale but then we had certain information that a person was concealed in a house’.