London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 07, 2025

Cressida Dick is staying as Met chief, but who else would take the poisoned chalice?

Cressida Dick is staying as Met chief, but who else would take the poisoned chalice?

After many calls for her resignation, Dick is the latest in a line of commissioners to be blamed for the police service’s failures
In 1955, after being presented with a damning report on corruption within the Metropolitan police, the then commissioner, Sir John Nott-Bower, went to West End Central police station, stood on a chair and reassured his officers that he did not believe a word of it. The days when a commissioner could quite so breezily dispose of criticism have long passed, as Cressida Dick learned from the many calls for her to resign before she was finally confirmed in office this month for a further two years. But how much personal responsibility should the holder of the top policing job in the country have for failings within the service they lead?

Nott-Bower came from an era when the Met was led by men – never, until Dick, by a woman – many of whom had backgrounds in the senior ranks of the armed services and when press coverage of the police was largely deferential. However, his successor, Joseph Simpson, had to deal with a public furore over a corrupt detective, Harold “Tanky” Challenor, who had planted half-bricks on demonstrators against the Greek royal family and only escaped jail on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to plead. John Waldron, who followed Simpson, was in charge in 1969 when an investigation in the Times lifted the lid on widespread corruption – he just managed to survive. His successor, Sir Robert Mark, was left with the job of, as he drily put it, “arresting more criminals than we employ”. Almost every commissioner since then has found a hand grenade left in their in-tray.

Sir Paul Condon’s tenure (1993 - 2000) was overshadowed by the murder of Stephen Lawrence and an inability to nail those responsible. During the subsequent inquiry into what had gone wrong he apologised to the Lawrences but said he would not be resigning: “I honestly believe it would be the cowardly thing to slink away at this point, or at any point.”

A total of no fewer than seven commissioners have now presided over the Met’s failure to resolve the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan. Understandably the Morgan family were among those who, along with Lady Lawrence and victims of the grimly bungled Operation Midland enquiry into bogus claims of a VIP paedophile ring, called in an open letter last week for Dick to go.

The letter’s signatories suggested that Dick had “presided over a culture of incompetence and cover-up” and that an overhaul of the Met’s senior team was “urgent and long overdue”. These are valid points, but how easy are such overhauls? After Condon acknowledged the faults of the Met, he received this broadside from the Police Federation’s chairman: “He has told the world we’re fiddling pensions and sick leave – if that is going on it is his problem – a management problem. He has told the world that we have 250 corrupt officers yet he has done nothing to substantiate that.”

Last week’s letter also criticised the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) as “demonstrably unfit for purpose” and called for “a functional governance system … to hold the police services to account”. The sentiment is admirable, but the IOPC is the third different incarnation of a police complaints system to be created since the 1980s and still faces major criticisms. How can it be resolved speedily? Theresa May, as home secretary, tried to investigate the scandal of the Morgan case by establishing a full inquiry but it took eight years for it to return with its critical conclusions.

That inquiry, led by Baroness Nuala O’Loan, which finally reported earlier this year, criticised both Dick and one of her predecessors, Lord Stevens, who was reprimanded for his relationship with the Murdoch empire. Stevens, commissioner from 2000 to 2005, devoted a chapter of his memoir to what he described as “The Trouble with [David] Blunkett”, claiming that the then home secretary was less than supportive: “He suddenly took it upon himself to tell the Evening Standard that I had six months in which to get the level of street crime down or be replaced.”

His successor, Ian Blair, was commissioner when Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead by police and he was duly felled, for other reasons, by the lack of support from the then London mayor, Boris Johnson (he departed saying that “without the mayor’s backing I do not think I can continue). Blair’s successor, Sir Paul Stephenson, also faced criticism for his links to Murdoch and after two and a half years announced his departure “as a consequence of the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met’s links with News International at a senior level”.

Officially, Dick enjoys the support of both the home secretary and the mayor of London, although Priti Patel’s backing is reported to be half-hearted and the two-year extension which has just been announced is said to have been granted because potential replacements are not yet deemed ready for the task.

It is not surprising that the government is happy for her to take the heat on issues of criminal justice rather than acknowledge their own catastrophic mistakes. The Met’s grant from central government fell by 29% between 2011 and 2019, leading to completely predictable shortages of personnel. The disastrous dismantlement of the probation service, when Chris Grayling was justice secretary, will take years to repair. The chaotic overcrowding of our prisons will now only be exacerbated by Patel’s determination, through the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, to increase jail terms and criminalise everyone from troublesome demonstrators to Gypsies and Travellers.

The current aim is supposedly to appoint the next commissioner from outside the Met but interlopers are not always welcome. When Robert Mark arrived in 1972 as the “Lone Ranger of Leicester” he felt, he wrote later, “like the representative of a leper colony attending the annual garden party of a colonial governor”. Recent events indicate that the chalice offered to the garden party guest will almost certainly be poisoned.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
Lilly CEO Warns UK Is ‘Worst Country in Europe’ for Drug Prices, Pulls Back Investment
Nigel Farage Emerges as Central Force in British Politics with Reform UK Surge
×