Cressida Dick absolutely despised Line of Duty. The endlessly promoted Metropolitan police chief really crossed the road to tip on the BBC smash hit – so tellingly incensed by a show about sidelined cops doing the painful and unpopular work of rooting out bad apples. As Dame Cressida finally resigns from the spoilt barrel of the Met, I couldn’t help but recall a 2019 Radio Times interview in which she expanded on her issues.
“I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is,” Dick told the magazine. “It’s so far from that. The standards and professionalism are so high.” Mmm. It was left to the show’s creator, Jed Mercurio, to offer a little background. “My inspiration for creating Line of Duty was @metpoliceuk shooting an innocent man and their dishonesty in the aftermath,” he explained icily, “so thanks to Cressida Dick for reminding me of our connection.” Dick, of course, ran the bungled counterterrorism operation that resulted in Met officers fatally shooting Jean Charles de Menezes, an entirely innocent 27-year-old electrician.
But oddly – indeed, bizarrely – that wasn’t the only Mercurio creation the Met chief had issues with. Both in the Radio Times interview and in an earlier outing on GMB, she added that she’d had to switch off the BBC’s Bodyguard – at the time, the most watched drama since current records began – because she couldn’t handle the mere idea of the two protagonists beginning a sexual relationship. As she put it: “The moment when the home secretary made a pass at the protection officer was just beyond me, I’m afraid.” And yet, beyond her how? Beyond her why? In recent memory, a police protection officer had been dismissed for allegedly having an affair with the wife of the then home secretary, Alan Johnson. At the time, the special operations directorate to which he reported was being run by one Cressida Dick.
Forgive me for beginning by focusing on Dick’s outrage about entirely fictional events, when she appeared to experience only mild displeasure at so many hideously real situations involving her officers. But Dame Cressida’s telly critiques unwittingly revealed her most deadly flaws: a total failure of imagination, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and a total loyalty to officers that superseded all else. The public came a very distant second, and increasingly knew it.
As for the historic moment in which we currently find ourselves, you can be sure some future screenwriter will one day consider it more than ripe for dramatisation. Consider where we lay our scene. The under-fire Met police are – reluctantly and belatedly – investigating multiple alleged criminal breaches of the law by the denizens of Number 10 Downing Street, the very people who made those laws. That should be mindblowing enough, and certainly is for the majority of ordinary British people, who have spent many weeks now feeling deeply furious and unforgivably mugged off by their overlords, while they were living under the most draconian restrictions imposed in peacetime. But there is more. There really are Conservative MPs who have spent a lot of those past few weeks explaining, on the record, that members of the government breaking their own laws isn’t that big a deal. Mindblowing again – and yet there is even more. Off the record, some Conservatives are now saying that should the prime minister be found to have breached the law and be served with fines or multiple fines … well, that isn’t too big a deal either, and he could certainly carry on being prime minister afterwards.
Still want more? You’re in luck! This morning, a senior ally of Boris Johnson warned that the Met would have to be “very certain” before it dared issue a fine to the PM for breaking lockdown law. “Do you want the Metropolitan police deciding who the prime minister is?” was the way this individual chose to characterise the mere idea of the Met doing their job without fear or favour. “They have to be very certain [before issuing a fine]. If he does get one, it would be odd if the discretionary action of the police determines the future of the country.” Would it? Would it not be more “odd” that the actual prime minister had allegedly repeatedly breached his own laws? Indeed, you might think it rather more “odd” that this was how very senior figures now characterised one of the most basic principles – applying the rule of law.
Meanwhile, you’ll be aware there is even more. Also this morning, the home secretary, Priti Patel, denounced the mayor of London’s decision to effectively force Cressida Dick’s resignation as “rude and unprofessional”. Rude and unprofessional – both those words feel like high praise from someone who was found by a formal investigation to have repeatedly bullied her own officials, but who refused to do the honourable thing and resign. The only person to resign in despair was the prime minister’s adviser on standards. Patel herself was protected by the same prime minister currently under investigation himself, in his case by the police.
There’s more – always more – but the above is a fairly stark summary of the state we’re in. If the BBC did ever commission a drama about the symbiosis between a fictional corrupt police force and a fictional corrupt government, it would probably be another huge hit. The national broadcaster makes pretty great television that is admired around the world – not that you’d know it from anything ever said by the government, which is itself not admired around the world. Yes, rest assured someone like Nadine Dorries would be straight out of the traps to dump on the corporation for disloyalty or bias or creating something more popular than her. And no doubt Nadine would be ably assisted by whoever Priti Patel appoints to replace Cressida Dick. It’s called sticking together, isn’t it? In the end, low calibre and underperforming politicians seem to like low calibre and underperforming public officials. Everyone gets something out of it, with the sole exception of the entire British public.
Yet there is something not just deeply depressing but increasingly dangerous about ordinary people thinking: “If I behaved like the prime minister or those police officers, I’d be sacked.” Trust is the very hardest thing to get back, and trust in the police and in politicians is demonstrably nosediving. Both have only themselves to blame. If there’s some great moral difference between police officers making rape and domestic violence jokes, and politicians claiming it doesn’t matter at all if the prime minister breaks the law, then I’d love to hear it. But there isn’t. However much some Conservatives and some Met officers may strain against it, this shameful moment in both their histories should be an inflection point.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
An evening with Marina Hyde and John Crace Join Marina Hyde and John Crace looking back at the latest events in Westminster on Monday, 7 March, at 8pm GMT | 9pm CET | 12pm PST | 3pm EST. Book ticket here
