ANOTHER MALE BASTION FALLS
Just 5ft tall, she’s the bluestocking who pounded the beat. Implicated in the killing of an innocent man after the 7/7 bombings, she triumphed with the jailing of Stephen Lawrence’s killers. Yesterday she became the first woman to head a very macho Scotla
TEN young officers pose for a photograph outside Bramshill Police Staff College. Their smiles reflect the fact they are considered to be the most promising of their generation. As such they are being fast-tracked to senior ranks.
But who among them would go furthest in the then still self-consciously macho profession?
It is 1995 and little more than 20 years have passed since female officers were fully integrated into the Metropolitan Police Service — Britain’s biggest force — allowing them to carry a truncheon and handcuffs for the first time. Nine out of the high- fliers in the photograph (right) are indeed men.
At least one was to become a chief constable. Another would achieve prominence in the national Police Superintendents’ Association. The rest were destined for provincial seniority. The odd one out seems to be the woman standing on the far-right of the front row.
At little more than 5ft tall, she is much shorter than her male counterparts. Some might even have regarded her a token presence.
Not so. The ‘fiercely bright’ Acting Chief Inspector Cressida Dick was not a student, like the others, but a course instructor.
Yesterday her ascent through the ranks and New Scotland Yard’s glass ceiling was complete when it was announced she was to become the Met’s first-ever female commissioner in the force’s 188- year history; arguably, the most powerful police officer in the world.
Ms Dick’s appointment — blessed by her long-time fan, the Prime Minister Theresa May — presents a remarkable career comeback.
She was sidelined at the Yard by outgoing commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe and spent the last two years in a senior role at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
But her appointment does not come without controversy.
Ms Dick, 56, was the officer in command of the disastrous antiterrorist firearms operation in 2005 which led to the fatal shooting in London of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.
Last week his family wrote a letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan calling for Ms Dick’s anticipated appointment to be blocked. It was published in the Left-leaning Guardian, a newspaper for which she has written in the past and where she might have expected to find strong support.
‘We cannot be expected to accept that the most senior police officer in the country, a post that is expected to uphold the highest standards of professionalism, to command public confidence and ultimately be responsible for ensuring that no police officer acts with impunity, be filled by someone that is clearly tainted by her failure to live up to any of those requirements,’ the letter said.
Ms Dick has had much to live up to since she was born Cressida Rose Dick, in Oxford in 1960.
Her Old-Wykehamist father, Marcus Dick, was a fellow and senior tutor at Oxford’s Balliol College and later became professor of philosophy at the new University of East Anglia.
HE
DIED of a heart attack when Cressida was 11 years old. Her historian mother Cecilia would become domestic bursar at Wolfson College.
Their daughter was given a classic Oxford bluestocking education. She attended the private Dragon School then Oxford High School before, in 1979, becoming one of the first intake of female undergraduates in Balliol’s 700-year history. There she read agriculture and forest sciences.
At Balliol, Ms Dick became captain of the college women’s rowing team and played wicket keeper for the cricket XI.
She was a contemporary of future City ‘ superwoman’ Nicola Horlick and is remembered by another former undergraduate as being ‘pleasant, quiet and unassuming’.
Given her family background, there must have been some expectation of a career in academe. But after trying her hand at accountancy, she joined the Met in 1983, initially as a beat bobby in West London. Female officers had been allowed to wear trousers instead of skirts only three years before.
Identified as a future star, she had achieved inspector rank within six years before being sent on an accelerated promotion course. She transferred to the Thames Valley force as a superintendent in 1995. It was there that she made some important career contacts.
Future Met commissioner Ian Blair was assistant and then deputy chief constable at Thames Valley at the time, with strong links with the controversial leadership training charity Common Purpose — sometimes described as ‘the Left’s equivalent of the Old Boys’ Network’.
Ms Dick would later tell the Leveson Inquiry that while a superintendent in Oxford she, too, had attended a Common Purpose course.
PERHAPS
the most significant of the acquaintances formed during this time away from London was with Theresa May, who became MP for Maidenhead, which is within the Thames Valley force area, in 1997. Both capable and ambitious, the two women would form a strong professional relationship over the next 20 years.
In 2001, after attending a strategic command course and studying for an MA in criminology at Cambridge, Ms Dick returned to the Yard at commander rank, in charge of the diversity directorate.
A number of ‘old school’ colleagues viewed her with initial suspicion. She was perceived as the protege of the very politically correct new deputy commissioner, Ian Blair.
But her relaxed attendance at CID dinners and Flying Squad boxing nights proved she was not aloof, and she earned the respect of rank-andfile officers.
Sir Ian Blair became commissioner in February 2005. Within months he and Ms Dick were fighting for their careers following the shooting of Mr de Menezes.
The incident came after the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005, when four bombs on the public transport system killed 52 people and injured more than 700 others.
Two weeks later four other wouldbe suicide bombers attempted another mass casualty attack, only for the devices to fail.
The manhunt which followed was the biggest in London’s history. On the morning of July 22 one suspect was located at an address in a block in Tulse Hill, South London. Ms Dick was the ‘gold commander’ in charge of the firearms operation to apprehend the alleged fugitive.
Mr de Menezes — who lived in the same block of flats and was an entirely innocent electrician going to work — was followed from the address to Stockwell Tube station.
When he boarded a train he was shot multiple times by police who had mistaken him for the fugitive.
Ms Dick later said she that while she gave the order for the suspect to be apprehended, she did not give the order for officers to open fire.
The death was a public relations catastrophe for the Met and Sir Ian and Ms Dick in particular.
To her credit she did not seek to avoid blame, describing Mr de Menezes’ death as a ‘terrible tragedy’ and saying: ‘Rest assured I will stand up and be counted for my decisions.’
Her dignity and stoicism in the aftermath further endeared her to staff — one senior detective remarking she had ‘ copperbottomed knickers’.
A criminal trial in 2007 found the Met guilty of Health and Safety offences and fined. The jury went out of its way to exonerate Ms Dick from any personal blame.
NO INDIVIDUALS were charged in relation to the death and an inquest the following year recorded an open verdict.
Ms Dick told the hearing: ‘If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.’ The Independent Police Complaints Commission also attached no blame to her.
But the conflicting police accounts of what had happened and why still cast a blot on her career and reputation.
She rebuilt both by overseeing the successful reinvestigation of the Stephen Lawrence murder which resulted in two of the original prime suspects being jailed for life in 2012.
She said after this success, which followed a long-standing Daily Mail campaign for them to face justice: ‘No murder in modern times, or in the whole history of the Met, has ever had the impact of the killing of Stephen Lawrence.’ By the time of the convictions of David Norris and Gary Dobson, she was head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. But two years later she was switched to a less prestigious post by Yard boss Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.
Friends of Ms Dick said she was not a fan of Hogan-Howe’s strongarm management style. Her effective demotion caused a great deal of friction between the pair — and with the support of then Home Secretary Theresa May, she landed a key post at the Foreign Office.
Now she has to ‘sort out the mess’ left by Hogan-Howe — a cashstrapped force with declining morale. At the top of her in-tray is balancing the books (the Met has a £3 billion budget) after Sir Bernard sold off properties worth hundreds of millions of pounds to keep officers on the streets.
SCOTLAND Yard faces a £400 million shortfall amid a simmering political row over claims that the capital’s force is being short- changed by the Government. Ms Dick must also fight to keep up front-line numbers, counteract rising knife crime and youth violence and reassure vulnerable victims.
All of this takes place against the background of the lingering terrorist threat of battle- hardened Islamic State militants returning from the Middle East.
The Met also faces a host of legal problems in the aftermath of Operation Midland, the VIP child sex-abuse inquiry fiasco. And Ms Dick must rebuild bridges with the media that were burned by Sir Bernard during the ill-fated multimillion pound inquiries sparked by the phone-hacking scandal.
According to well-placed sources, it was Mrs May who made clear to Ms Dick that she wanted her to apply to be Commissioner.
The £270,000 salary position will see her get a damehood. And when she does take up the post (HoganHowe steps down tomorrow), Commissioner Dick will join a cohort of women who now fill the top jobs of the justice system — from Alison Saunders as Director of Public Prosecutions to Lynne Owens at the National Crime Agency and Home Secretary Amber Rudd, among others.
In her statement last night Ms Dick said that she ‘looked forward’ to ‘working again with the fabulous women and men of the Met’.
The reversal of the usual order of gender was noted.
A new era dawns.