For Durham Police’s first female chief constable in the force’s 183-year history, Jo Farrell faced a baptism of fire, within months having to enforce strict lockdown rules amid the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Then Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, broke the lockdown rules which he had helped to create right on her patch.
Speaking to the Mirror during an exclusive interview in her office at the Aykley Heads HQ, she reveals why Cummings was not interviewed by police over his 260-mile trip to Durham from London or that day out to Barnard Castle to “test his eyesight”.
Ms Farrell, 53, says: “Because of his character, because of who he was, he divided political lines.
“We police without fear or favour. We are apolitical, so it was my job to make sure that there was a proportionate line. Had we stopped him when he was driving to Barnard Castle, we would have told him to turn around and go back.
“Thousands of people have lost their lives in the pandemic so, yes, we never took any of this lightly. But we could not be influenced by the huge political feeling about him as an individual and his role within the Government.”
When the Mirror broke the story in May, 2020, in a joint investigation with the Guardian, Durham Police and Ms Farrell personally got hundreds of emails and calls from members of the public. Even now, two years on, it remains “the single biggest issue” raised in emails from the public to her personal office.
But Ms Farrell, who took over from Mike Barton, who had led the force to be judged “outstanding” in the four years before he left in 2019, is “absolutely confident and satisfied the decisions we took then will stand the test of time”.
She says that rather than interview Mr Cummings, officers took his version of events from his televised speech in the rose garden of No10.
She says: “I remember thinking, as he talked, that it would be the account of the circumstances. We used that, so it was quite useful in that way. It was very unusual for an advisor to appear in the back garden of Downing Street.
“From a proportionality point of view, there was an extensive and well documented narrative about what he had done and where he had been. We used that and information about the decision making around it.”
Ms Farrell, who is married to a retired police officer, and has two stepsons and a daughter, said her force had to maintain the confidence of the public once the pandemic was over.
That cannot have been made easier by the behaviour of Boris Johnson, who is waiting to hear if he will be fined for further partygate lockdown breaches after he became the first sitting Prime Minister found guilty of law breaking.
Ms Farrell joined the police in 1991, aged 22, as a constable in Cambridge.
She recalls the first time she ended up in a fight – with a woman she arrested on a public order offence outside a pub.
She says: “I remember us all rolling around on the floor together. I could also take you to the flat in Cambridge where a woman had been hit over the head with an iron. She had this massive cut in her head from the triangle of the iron.
“I remember the partner trying to attack me with a knife.”
In 2002, Ms Farrell joined Northumbria Police, initially as a Chief Inspector.
She was in charge of firearms on the night that the biggest manhunt in recent criminal history ended with the death of killer Raoul Moat, who shot himself in the head when cornered by police.
She says: “He was a man with nothing to lose. He was armed with a shotgun. We had to look at the use of long-range Tasers, which were not authorised at the time. The disappointment is that the families of his victims did not see justice.”
In her current role, she is proud that her force is now the best performing in the country for improving rape convictions. She says: “We have a real culture of finding the truth, and our officers feel free to make decisions. They really make a difference to people’s lives.”
Ms Farrell is also proud to be one of the UK’s 15 woman chief constable.
She says: “When you walk into this building, you walk past a number of white men who are pictured on the wall.
“At the time of my appointment, there were only five or six women chief constables in the country. We have come a long way in a short space of time.”
