This is the autobiography of the Head of Scotland Yard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police between 2000 to 2005. He started as an PC in London in the days of whistles and truncheons and progressed through detective work to become Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, Chief Constable of Northumbria, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Constabulary, and author of three reports on the policing of Northern Ireland. So he has had a very successful career.
I can't imagine liking him as a man. He glories in the fact that he often worked sixteen to eighteen hour days so his poor wife Cynthia (and three children) can hardly have seen him (especially since, in pursuit of his career, he often took postings far from their family home). Furthermore, he seems to have been a person whose every decision was correct. Nowhere does he suggest that he could have done something better or that he made a mistake; he always excuses himself. I can find no evidence of empathy with those on the wrong side of the law; he appears intractably inflexible in his attitude towards policing. This spills over into his attitude towards public order; he asserts that people have the right to protest but he kettled protestors for seven hours in Oxford Circus; when the court acquits someone he always seems to regard it as a wrong decision (except when he himself was on trial over alleged Health and Safety offences). This is a man who, in his own eyes, is always right. I am a little frightened of men like that.
Selected quotes:
October 2019; 323 pages
Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.
- "Before the pay rises introduced by the Royal Commission of 1960, [police] officers had been going to work at the end of the week with sandwiches that had no fillings." (C 4)
- "There was a party in the office every Friday night ... nobody liked eating on an empty stomach." (C 10)
October 2019; 323 pages
Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.
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