  We show that the position operator with commuting components proposed by M.
Hawton [M. Hawton, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 59}, 954 (1999)] and developed in
subsequent papers, including the recent ones, does not have the properties
required for a photon position operator. Depending on the exact interpretation
of the results it either concerns a triplet of massless spin zero particles
rather than the photon, or does not have the required covariance properties
under space rotations.
