Will this be the first woman to head the Met police?
Cressida Dick is the favourite to be announced as Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe’s replacement this week
EN years ago this month former members of the Flying Squad held a charity boxing evening in a function room at the Café Royal. The ex-detectives mingled with celebrities over drinks as they awaited the arrival of the guests of honour, a group of serving senior Metropolitan Police officers. And when they made their appearance, a huge cheer went up as the spotlight picked out a slight female figure in plain clothes who was leading the bigwigs to their table.
Her name was Cressida Dick and in those days she was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner in charge of specialist operations, which include the Flying Squad and the Murder Squad. But later this week the 56-year-old woman who earned the affection and respect of everyone from beat bobbies to the top brass as she rose from being a PC pounding the streets of London’s West End to the highest echelons of the force is tipped to be named the first female Commissioner of the Met in its 187-year history.
If Dick does secure the top job she will become the most powerful police officer in the land, in charge of a force of 32,000 officers, one quarter of the total in England and Wales.
“The role couldn’t go to a better candidate,” according to one insider. “She’s head and shoulders above the other people in the running.”
That’s a figure of speech, by the way. Dick is so short and slight that some express surprise that she could have reached the minimum height requirement of 5ft 4in that was in force when she joined the Met in 1983.
“She’s like a sparrow and when you see her in a room among male colleagues, with the weight of the scrambled egg on her epaulettes making the shoulders of her tunic droop, you would never dream of her running the show. But as soon as she starts talking she projects such an air of authority, such confidence without arrogance, that you are immediately won over. Her stature lies in her voice.”
HOWEVER she clearly had issues with the outgoing Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, a bluff Yorkshireman whose man-management skills have been called into question more than once. Three years after he was appointed, Dick retired from the police to join the Foreign Office as a director-general, a highranking role with responsibilities that remain opaque to this day.
And there Dick might have stayed if she had not been persuaded to apply to become HoganHowe’s replacement by “senior political figures”, who are said to have given her an assurance that she would be treated as a serious candidate despite no longer being a serving police officer.
Ranged against her for the £270,648-a-year post are Met assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the current head of UK counter terrorism, Stephen Kavanagh, the chief constable of Essex, and Sara Thornton, who heads the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
All four candidates have undergone psychometric tests to assess their psychological make-up, personality and ability to take advice – the first time such testing has been used to help make the appointment.
And they are due to meet the Home Secretary Amber Rudd and London Mayor Sadiq Khan tomorrow. Rudd and Khan will then make a recommendation to the Prime Minister Theresa May who will have the final say on the appointment.
Dick, who got to know the PM during her long stint as Home Secretary before entering No10, is also believed to have impressed Khan. The Mayor – who is the son of Pakistani immigrants – would like the new Commissioner to be sensitive to the increasingly cosmopolitan make up of the capital.
Dick’s two-year stint as head of the Met’s diversity directorate and her role in the reinvestigation of the Stephen Lawrence case that resulted in the conviction of two of the killers of the black teenager 20 years after the initial botched investigation established her credentials in this area.
If she is confirmed as the new Commissioner later this week Dick will have her work cut out. The new Met chief will face pressure from the Mayor to push through measures to increase diversity in the ranks while making £400million in budget cuts by 2020 at a time when the force is beset by low morale and rising crime.
However, if anyone has what it takes it is Dick, who has an unusual background for a policewoman. Both her parents were academics at the University of Oxford, the city in which she was brought up.
She attended the £20,000-a-year Dragon School – many boys from which go on to Eton – and then Oxford High School before winning a place at the university’s prestigious Balliol College.
After graduating, Dick dabbled with a career in accountancy before taking the adventurous step of joining the Met on the lowest rung of the ladder. Despite her highpowered academic background, the down-to-earth Dick relished the nitty-gritty of police work and in the decade that followed rose from beat bobby to chief inspector.
In 1993 she was talent-spotted for an accelerated promotion course at Bramshill Police College and two years later transferred to the Thames Valley force as a superintendent.
By the time she returned to the Met as a commander in 2001, she had picked up a masters in criminology from Cambridge, and was tipped for big things. But in 2005 she was involved in an incident that had ramifications for the Met’s reputation as well as her own.
She was the “gold commander” in the control room on the day that a Brazilian student called Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on a Tube train by police officers who suspected him of being one of the fugitives responsible for a string of attempted bomb attacks the previous day.
De Menezes was just the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Metropolitan Police was duly prosecuted for health and safety failings and during the trial Dick took to the witness box to defend herself against allegations that she had made a string of strategic mistakes that had contributed to the tragedy.
The jury found the Met as a whole guilty, but took the unusual step of sending a letter to the judge exonerating Dick of personal blame.
In a subsequent interview about the case she said: “It was a very difficult time. For an innocent man to be killed at the hands of the police is thankfully incredibly rare and an awful, awful thing. It was my job and my duty to get on with it. I had to stand up and be counted.”
It was just such an approach that made her so popular with her subordinates. They knew they could rely on her to give them the resources they needed and to back them up when it mattered. “She’s not the sort of person who needs to compensate for a lack of ability with swagger and posturing,” says our insider. “She’s got gravitas.”
The Queen has already recognised Dick’s talents twice: first with the award of the Queen’s Police Medal in 2009 and then with a CBE in 2015. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister will crown these honours with the ultimate title: Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.