Cannabis? I can’t smell it, says Met chief
AS HEAD of the Metropolitan Police, she is the most senior officer in Britain.
But Cressida Dick, the Met’s first female Commissioner, has one flaw that makes her useless on a drugs raid – she can’t smell cannabis.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she revealed: ‘My colleagues think it’s hilarious that I simply cannot ever smell cannabis. I am hopeless in that respect.’ However, Ms Dick said that ‘scent is very important to me’, and she chose ‘floral soaps’ as her l uxury i t em because they ‘remind me of flowers I have grown and happy times’.
Ms Dick, 58, also confessed to a rebellious past that may even have extended to breaking the law. She said: ‘At school, I was quite naughty, on and off. I hope I was never unkind or criminal in my behaviours but I probably was. My brother says I was a handful.’ The revelation came after presenter Lauren Laverne confronted Ms Dick with a school report which described her as being ‘ attractive’ but also ‘quite roguish in her personality’. Looking back to her time at the Dragon School in Oxford, Ms Dick said: ‘ I think there were two of us girls in my year of 60odd people. It was great, I loved it. I was knocking around with all these boys, playing rugby and cricket with the boys, football with the boys.’
Ms Dick said that after she was turned down by her local Thames Valley force, she feared her height of 5ft might end her dreams of becoming a police officer. ‘At the time, you had to be 5ft 4in. I only really got in because the nurse [conducting the police physical exam] helped me and I had been stretching a lot for days before.’
Ms Dick came t o public prominence when she commanded the operation in which i n n o c e n t c o mmuter J e a n Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police officers in 2005 when they wrongly believed he was a suicide bomber.
She said: ‘It taught me a lot about what counts in my life.
‘I wish, wish, wish, it hadn’t happened. But if anything it’s made me a better leader, a better police officer. It’s made me more resilient.’ Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.15am.