There was something that didn’t quite stack up about Dame Cressida Dick’s departure last week. The first-ever female Met Commissioner resigned a few hours after Sadiq Khan told her she’d lost his confidence, without even bothering to include the Home Secretary in the conversation.
Yet it’s Priti Patel, legally, who has the power to fire her not the London Mayor, who must just be “consulted”. So why didn’t Dame Cressida fight it? She’d only just been given a two-year extension by Patel, begrudgingly, and had repeatedly vowed to stay to clear up her deeply troubled force. Why didn’t she even appeal to the Home Secretary, who has her own vicious mutual loathe-fest with Khan, to intervene?
There is clearly a missing piece to the jigsaw. I am told it is this. In October last year, Patel commissioned HM Inspectorate of Constabulary to review anti-corruption procedures in the Met after the Daniel Morgan inquiry, which looked at whether there was police collusion in the private investigator getting murdered by an axe to the head in 1987. At the start of last week, the HMIC briefed Khan, Patel and Dame Cressida on the main conclusions of their report, which will be published next month. They are extremely damning, and reveal a force still in organisational disarray.
The report contains “a dozen Daily Mail front page stories”, according to one who has seen it, and highlights sloppy mis-practice across the board. It quotes a myriad of examples, from upwards of 50 police officers with criminal convictions allowed to join up in the last few years, to one police station safe with secret evidence that has the code to it scrawled above it on the wall.
It is, say those familiar with it, extremely embarrassing for Dame Cressida, and something she will have struggled to survive when it became public. A potential final straw, after so many previous scandals, from Sarah Everard’s murder to the toxic Charing Cross texts.
Dame Cressida will also have known that even if Patel had wanted to, no Home Secretary could have saved her from Khan’s onslaught last week, knowing what all three of them did about the HMIC report. So it seems clear that, shrewdly, Khan spotted the political opportunity to notch up three victories for the price of one. He could do in Dame Cressida, who he had long ago fallen out with, at the same time as embarrassing Patel by making her look impotent, and appearing tough and decisive himself. Snookered into an inescapable corner, the Commissioner realised the game was up. Dame Cressida is a highly impressive public servant, and — with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge — one of the brightest officers ever to serve in the Met.
She is also loved by her rank and file as “a copper’s copper”, as the seething Met Police Federation demonstrated this week with their statement of support for her. One retired former officer adoringly tells the story about how, as a young inspector, the 5 ft 2in Dame Cressida once insisted on leading a raid on an illegal south London drinking den by going through the door first, with both fists flailing. But her one great failing was a deep loyalty to her officers that meant she was too ready to believe, naively, that they were reforming. That, while she mounted ceaseless displays of public support for them and took all their brickbats, the bovine element’s hate-filled toxicity towards women, minorities or gay people was changing. It wasn’t, and it was they who let her down the most.
But perhaps they weren’t the only ones. There were also the politicians.
Did she really deserve to be the plaything of their bitter feuding, as they jockeyed to sacrifice her on the altar of their own internecine rivalries?
It’s also deeply convenient for both Khan and Patel to make her the scapegoat for failings on law and order that extend far beyond the Met Commissioner’s control. Murders have risen year on year since Khan took office (a year before Dame Cressida was appointed). Cyber crime is out of all control nationally. Trust in policing may be falling fastest in the capital, but is going down all across the UK. British policing is outdated and in crisis, and it’s far from just the Met.
The ugly truth is nobody comes out of the Dick debacle well. Not her, not her rank and file coppers, not Sadiq Khan, nor Priti Patel. Londoners really do deserve better. They deserve a fair cop.
In other news...
Why his phone chat with the Queen could help save BorisThe Prime Minister’s lawyers are putting together a series of technical arguments that, he hopes, will mean he escapes a fixed penalty notice for partygate.
One, an ally tells me, is that though Boris might have had a glass of wine at No10 shindigs, Covid regulations didn’t stipulate you can’t drink alcohol at work events. Another is that he never stayed long enough to properly party, and his office diary proves it. I’m told he only “popped in for 10 minutes” on the Abba bash in the Johnsons’ flat to celebrate Dominic Cummings’ departure.
Johnson also has an impeccable excuse for only staying 25 minutes at the now infamous Downing Street garden party. It being a Wednesday, he had to go back inside for his weekly telephone audience with the Queen.
Johnson’s allies admit that arguing the finer legal niceties is one thing, but the political optics are far trickier. Effectively getting off on a technicality stinks, especially when it might involve sticking your own wife in it.
Farewell: my last column for the StandardThis, I’m sad to say, is my last column for this wonderful newspaper, at least for a while. I’m presenting the evening news programme on the new network, Talk TV, that launches very soon, and must concentrate on how on earth to be a half-decent anchorman.
Britain’s very own Ron Burgundy, Piers Morgan, left, has the flagship show that follows mine. He isn’t really helping. Leaping on Downing Street’s “Operation Save Big Dog” during rehearsals, Piers has taken to calling himself “le Grand Chien” and me “le Petit Chien”. Thank you for reading. I’ll be bark.
Tom Newton Dunn is a presenter on Times Radio
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