Dodgy Dick Ditched

As Dame Cressida Dick gets ditched, Matthew Steeples suggests now is not the time to replace one Dick with another

Metropolitan Police commisoner Dame Cressida Dick DBE, QPM thought she was the Teflon Don. It turns out she was more like a leftover from a Tupperware party and now this incompetent woman whose total lacking of understanding that leadership must always start and stop at the top of any organisation has quite rightly been turfed out with the Tupperware party trash.

Forced out admittedly far too late by the frankly equally inept Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan – whom should have acted at the very latest during the shameful episode when officers mistreated ladies at a vigil for the murdered-by-a-cop victim Sarah Everard on Clapham Common in March 2021 – ‘Clinger-on Cressida’ was remembered this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme as a commissioner who “stopped listening to the public” and someone “who loved her officers too much and was always overly defensive against any form of external criticism.”

Though lauded as “impressive with management” by some, this University of Oxford educated daughter of two University of Oxford academics was actually out of her depth, a piss-poor communicator and totally lacking in clarity and direction. Here was a woman who simply did nothing when faced with repeated evidence that she ran a police force that was rotten at its core and dominated by misogynistic, racist, sexist bigots.

Dame Cressida, it must be recalled also, was herself “absolutely outraged” by the BBC Line of Duty series. Now, she like the corrupt officers in the most watched drama on British television in 13 years has been finally exposed and named and shamed and now it is time for the Met Police to do the right thing: Appoint a replacement with integrity and the ability to shakeup this deservedly disgraced law enforcement body. It is time for real change and it is most certainly time for one Dick not to be replaced with another.

Dame Cressida Dick’s Catalogue of Errors

Currently incarcerated pension pot plunderer’s decidedly dodgy mucky madam sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell’s school and university mate will go down in history for the following:

• 1987 – Botched investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan.
• 1993 – Botched investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
• 1994 – Botched investigation into allegations that Ghislaine Maxwell operated a brothel in South Kensington.
• 2009 – Unlawful killing of Ian Tomlinson during his arrest by Met Police officers.
• 2005 – Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by Met Police officers on the orders of Cressida Dick.
• 2013 – Strip searching of Dr Koshka Duff during her arrest for intervening during a Met Police stop-and-search of a black teenager.
• 2014 – Bungled investigation into allegations of historic child abuse made by Carl Beech.
• 2014 to 2015 – Failure to stop Stephen Port committing subsequent serial killings in spite of his already being linked to the death of a man outside his home.
• 2019 – Farcical mismanagement of policing of Extinction Rebellion protests leading to a bill of £37 million in policing costs.
• 2020 – Misconduct of Met Police officers during their investigation into the murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.
• 2020 – Found to be 2.17 times as likely to issue fines to black people relative to the rest of the population during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
• 2021 – Misconduct of Met Police officers during their investigation into the disappearance of Richard Okorogheye.
• 2021 – Met Police officer Ben Hannam found to be a member of a banned terrorist group.
• 2021 – Shocking conduct of Met Police officers after the murder of Sarah Everard by one of their own colleagues.
• 2022 – Found to have found to have failed to do anything about misogynistic, racist, sexist officers at Charing Cross police station in spite of having known about what was going on there since 2018.
• 2022 – Apparent collaboration with Boris Johnson and his government to delay report into ‘Partygate.’