Which of these PC plodders will be handed top cop’s job?
IN BRITISH public life, nothing succeeds like failure, provided you belong to the Blessed Company of the Politically Correct. We learn from media leaks that two politically correct women, Cressida Dick and Sara Thornton, are on the final shortlist for the post of Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Although we are supposed not to care any longer what sex anyone is, those in charge of this appointment no doubt long to choose the ‘first woman’ to hold the job. And if they do, they will be applauded wildly by the Left-wing establishment.
I am more interested in whether these people are up to the job, regardless of sex, which is surely the truly anti-sexist position. Let’s see what happens.
Whoever holds this post has a huge and lasting influence over policing throughout the country. He or she will have the ear of Ministers and immense media access. Other forces will strive to copy what they do.
But if either Ms Dick or Ms Thornton were politically incorrect whiteskinned males, I do not think they would be in the competition at all. No doubt both are perfectly pleasant people, well educated and charming. They are beloved by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, have been decorated with medals and invited to Royal occasions.
But both are personally linked to gigantic and undoubted police failures. Ms Dick was ‘Gold Commander’ in charge of the 2005 ‘operation’ in which the wholly innocent Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead on the London Underground after officers wrongly assumed he was a terrorist.
After this she was repeatedly promoted to higher positions before being transferred to the Foreign Office for some lofty function.
Ms Thornton was in charge of Thames Valley Police when they were inexcusably slow to act against a gang of men who subjected several young girls to appalling sexual abuse in Oxford.
In March 2015, Maggie Blyth, of the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board, who had compiled a report on the episode, said: ‘It is shocking that these children were subjected to such appalling sexual exploitation for so long.’ She spoke of ‘a culture across all organisations that failed to see that these children were being groomed in an organised way by groups of men’. Ms Thornton responded: ‘We are ashamed of the shortcomings identified in this report and we are determined to do all we can to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.’
No doubt. But, like Ms Dick’s problems, it did not affect her climb to the top. Asked if she had considered resigning, she said: ‘The focus has got to be moving forward. I think the focus for me is on driving improvements in the future.’ By then she was already on her way to take up a post as head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council. I know little of Ms Thornton. I live in the area whose policing she used to head. Until this newspaper made a fuss, her organisation was reluctant to provide escorts for the hearses bearing dead soldiers home from Afghanistan, which passed through her area. But otherwise, it is no more absent and reactive than any other police ‘service’ I know of, which isn’t saying much.
As for Ms Dick, she was on her way to the summit from the start.
She was sent on a ‘national police high-flyers’ course’ in the 1980s. There she wrote a dissertation, arguing that ‘the way Lady Thatcher used the police to crush the miners had undermined public support, by creating the impression that the police had been reduced to the status of political tools’.
AS A senior officer in Oxford, she preferred to withdraw rather than disperse demonstrators who had blocked a major road by holding an allday rave. She said that there were children among the protesters and ‘although people were breaking the law and causing disruption we let it go ahead’. In 2002, as the Metropolitan Police ‘Diversity Director’, she launched a poster campaign in London urging the public to report to the police those whose views they found hateful.
For many years I have tried to point out that the public don’t want or need this sort of policing, and long only for a force that is visible on the streets and deters the crime and disorder that now affect so many.
Nobody listens, just as nobody listened to all the other points I and others patiently made for years about (for example) education, drugs, immigration and the EU.
Those who ignore these warnings will, in the end, face an explosion of wrath which will make Donald Trump look like Woody Allen.
And then, no doubt, they’ll all go out on petulant, sweary demonstrations complaining about the thing they have themselves helped to create. It’ll be too late.