It’s not the greatest look for a head of the Metropolitan Police to find herself the butt of satire in a Line of Duty spoof viewed some 1.7 million times within a day of being posted. The video, which did the viral rounds this weekend, pulled together key scenes from the BBC show and edited Met Commissioner Cressida Dick into one clip featuring the fictitious Superintendent Ted Hastings — suggesting that Dame Cressida’s intervention in “partygate” has aligned London’s police force too favourably with the interests of Number 10.
But the satire struck a chord for a reason. As the Sue Gray report enters a second week of delay — with even less likelihood of being released without redactions than last Monday — some detractors are even suggesting that Dame Cressida, 61, has been deployed to kick the report into the long grass and give Boris Johnson some time to bounce back before the report delivers its hammering.
Dame Cressida and the PM have been in each other’s orbits since their student days: both studied at Balliol, Oxford, Johnson a few years below her. She had been given a damehood on Theresa May’s resignation honours list, presumably as the precursor to retirement, but fought to stay in post under Johnson. On the PM’s watch last September, Dame Cressida was given a two-year extension to her term as Met Commissioner, despite the fall-out of the Met’s handling of the murder of Sarah Everard and the incredibly heavy-handed policing of a vigil for the 33-year-old last March.
The Gray report is the latest chapter in Dame Cressida’s eventful stint as London’s top police officer. She has been in post since 2017 and friends say that getting involved was the last thing she’d have wanted. It has dragged her far closer to the political fray than is comfortable for a woman who one previous head of the Met describes as “absolutely apolitical, straight dealing and incorruptible”. But another erstwhile senior ally says: “Cress is a straight arrow but she can be so immune to having politics intrude in the way she operates that it verges on the naïve.”
And her proximity to this political scandal may prove dangerous territory for a Met Commissioner who fought hard for an extension to her tenure in the teeth of criticism over her part in several high-profile blunders. From Operation Midland — which exposed public figures to unsubstantiated suspicion on evidence which turned out to be the work of fantasist — to ongoing concerns about the ability of the Met to rise to diversity challenges, and the tensions over demonstration policing unleashed by the Everard vigil.
Others wonder if an extension she agreed after a period of strained relations with Home Secretary Priti Patel was a wise idea. Dame Cressida will also remember the fallout from the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate” drama. In 2012, Tory MP Mitchell had a bad-tempered exchange with a police officer about pushing his bike through the Downing Street gates, leading to a convoluted saga which ultimately showed that some officers involved, but not the primary witness, Pc Toby Rowland, had colluded to present the most damaging version of the incident — and a criminal conviction for one of those involved.
Truly, the Met was in a difficult position when rumours of Number 10 rule-breaking started to emerge. Police involvement in alleged wrongdoing by a Prime Minister should have a reasonably high hurdle to clear to prevent law enforcers being dragged into party political feuds. As allegations of rule-busting gatherings emerged thick and fast, Dame Cressida was adamant that fixed penalty notices for breaches should not be issued after the lockdowns, even to the political powerful. “Cress was inflexible and a bit slow footed,” says a senior colleague. “She believed no one wanted to feed a society of denunciation and score-settling.”
The problems with this approach however became apparent as “partygate” sprawled from stories of one-off events to what looks like a culture of defiance in Number 10 about rules which others were given fines for not obeying. At that point, many former allies of the Commissioner believe that she should have changed her approach to avoid the Met and protection officers looking like helpless bystanders, with one newspaper reporting that a tipsy staff member had boasted to a security guard about being “the only people who are allowed to party”. Why that was not challenged at the time will be a difficult question for Downing Street police and protection officers (both answer to the Met) to explain.
Dame Cressida won’t relish dealing with this episode — nor the spotlight on her. To her supporters — and she has many who respect her diligence and toughness when criticism rains down on the capital’s police force — Dame Cressida is “the ultimate police officer experienced and no fool in managing difficult colleagues”. But many others have been, vocally, critical. David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary — and a previous admirer — declared in a column yesterday that Dame Cressida had failed to rise to the task. “Whatever sympathies I have had for Dick and her colleagues is rapidly seeping away. Unless the Met start to show the rational and clear leadership expected of them, heads, as in the political arena, must surely roll.”
A kinder interpretation would be that this was a saga of spectacularly bad timing. Gray’s report was intended to be speedy and she was, I gather, surprised by how many events and reported attendees she needed to assemble to be comprehensive — hence the delay. What’s more, Number 10 had spent months denying that parties took place at all.
Dame Cressida is Britain’s most prominent and highly promoted female police officer, and she has been in the thick of the complexities and difficulties of modern policing: from early successes cracking drug gangs to the disaster of being in the control room when a police marksman fatally shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. Often, criticism of her style comes from those who fret that she can exceed the limits of due diligence in policing — her approval of “slamming” techniques by officers to challenge violent moped gangs drew criticism as reckless — but I also heard her give a strong personal defence of the need to “put the fear back into the criminal”. Her biggest fear, she told me then, was losing control of London streets: “That is not happening on my watch”. This ability to stand up for difficult choices and readiness to chide the Government for budget cuts leading to falling police numbers has earned her a solid reputation as a leader who defends her force.
The jockeying to succeed her is getting louder, with Neil Basu, a fellow counter-terror expert, the lead contender
By comparison with the most demanding end of her job, an investigation into “BYOB” gatherings and birthday parties in defiance of Covid rules, looks like trivia. But Dame Cressida’s resistance to having the police investigate sooner, followed by a sudden volte-face and now an ill-timed intervention, looks chaotic. It should, says one legal expert on policing and trials, be possible to investigate rule-breaking for which the punishment is fixed-penalty fines. On this view, an over-cautious Commissioner has held up the inquiry for no very good reason and arguably exceeded her powers by interfering in the publication of a Government inquiry in full. The only way out of what one Tory front bench MP calls “this circus” for both the Met and then Gray to issue their findings speedily and without redactions to restore shaken public trust.
That is the last thing Dame Cressida would want. She has been a police officer by commitment and a drive to help professionalise a service on the frontline of difficult social issues and invidious choices. The daughter of an Oxford philosopher father and historian mother, she is a “born policewoman”, as a friend puts it. As well as breaking the glass ceiling, Dame Cressida finally decided to come out as gay a few years ago — a decision she once told me she made “because I wanted to look young gay recruits in the eye at their passing-out parade and show I know what it is like to be them and that they have a great career ahead”. Her no-fuss approach won plaudits when she announced on Desert island Discs: “I happen to love Helen. She’s my partner — and on we go.”
Whether she now “goes on” for the designated extra two years she fought so hard to secure is less certain. The jockeying to succeed her is now louder than it was. Neil Basu, a senior serving police officer and a fellow counter-terror expert, is the lead contender to replace Dame Cressida. He has recently been given a key role preparing top ranks for other top jobs, which looks to many colleagues like the “finishing school” to secure the Met’s succession. “I can’t see him not being in the job, at the last in two years and possibly before then,” says one. The Met Commissioner might ruefully reflect that the ugly hangover of Downing Street’s party fever has added more reputational damage to its toll.
