In search of interesting lockdown walks within the statutorily permitted sphere, I found myself recently in the huge Kensal Green cemetery in north London. My eye caught a Victorian memorial which looked like a smaller but still striking imitation of Cleopatra’s needle. It was the tomb of “Sir Richard Mayne, second Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.”
I had never heard of Sir Richard Mayne—have you? When I googled him I was amazed to read that he was Met Commissioner for—wait for it—39 years, serving under 14 Home Secretaries. And no cipher either. Taking over from Sir Charles Rowan, the Met’s founding Commissioner, who himself served 20 years, Mayne has a fair claim to have created—or at least inspired—today’s national system of policing. He increased the size of London’s original force of less than 1,000 men to 8,000, and increased the territory it policed by tenfold to encompass the whole metropolitan area. By his death in office in 1868, “the idea had spread to every county and town in the country,” says Wikipedia.
They don’t make them like that nowadays. The Met has had five commissioners in just the last 20 years, two of whom—Ian Blair and his successor Paul Stephenson—lasted less than four years. Cressida Dick reaches that milestone next month. Though she bears a striking resemblance to the “Berlin Cleopatra”—the Roman sculpture of the great leader—only a supreme optimist could predict that she will be on a pedestal for many years longer, even if she survives Saturday’s Sarah Everard vigil crisis.
I don’t, however, think that Dick should resign. Sadiq Khan is right to institute an independent inquiry of the policing of the vigil/protest. My view, from watching the TV footage, is that the police would have done better to have kept back and not treated the outpouring of grief and anger at an especially tragic and vicious murder as if it were an illegal rave.
But this was clearly an operational matter, with difficult policing decisions taken not only in the heat of the moment, but in the middle of a pandemic where all such gatherings are illegal. Yet even if the inquiry agrees with this view, the right course is an apology, restitution for those arrested, and a pledge to learn lessons—not replacing Dick with another Met Commissioner who will probably be no better, just less experienced.
Cressida Dick’s virtue, to my mind, is precisely that she does not behave like Cleopatra. She reminds me a bit of Angela Merkel: quietly effective yet understated, a leadership style we could do more of. The last thing London needs is a Met Commissioner in the image of Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Oh, and I read of Sir Richard Mayne: “he became increasingly aloof and distant from both the public and his men, instructing them to enforce regulations that were seen by many as petty and unnecessary, such as forbidding children to throw snowballs in public places.” We can guess how he would have policed the vigil.
Burying Boris’s bridge
The unwritten story this week is how Sir Peter Hendy, commissioned by Boris to report on “infrastructure to strengthen the United Kingdom,” deftly buried Boris’s absurd bridge across the Irish Sea.
His report, smuggled out last Thursday, rightly prioritises HS2 to Scotland and, within Ireland, new rail and road links from Derry to Belfast and Dublin. Infrastructure connecting Catholic Derry to the rest of Northern Ireland has been shamefully neglected for a century, and so too Dublin-Belfast links.
Boris’s Irish Sea bridge or tunnel is relegated to a “technical assessment.”
Within Great Britain, getting HS2 trains direct from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh as soon as possible, taking no more than three hours, is the single biggest contribution that infrastructure can make to the Union. It is absolutely doable and it should be a national priority. Instead, Boris’s Treasury has put an indefinite delay on the eastern leg of HS2 to Leeds, which is essential to getting HS2 trains to Edinburgh.
As the prime minister used to declaim at Eton: “Medice, cura te ipsu” (physician, heal thyself).
Go Big
Great to hear that my friend Ed Miliband is about to publish a book entitled Go Big, with “20 transformative solutions to fix our world,” although struggling Keir Starmer may not be quite so keen on the backseat advice.
So far as this bit of our world is concerned, the top big solution should of course be for Britain to rejoin the European Union, in the week it was revealed that British exports to the EU fell by an astonishing 40 per cent after the start of Brexit in January.
Somehow I don’t think Red Wall Ed, who voted for Boris’s disastrous Brexit deal, will be saying this. Maybe his book should be retitled: Go Big—but not here.
They don’t make them like that nowadays. The Met has had five commissioners in just the last 20 years, two of whom—Ian Blair and his successor Paul Stephenson—lasted less than four years. Cressida Dick reaches that milestone next month. Though she bears a striking resemblance to the “Berlin Cleopatra”—the Roman sculpture of the great leader—only a supreme optimist could predict that she will be on a pedestal for many years longer, even if she survives Saturday’s Sarah Everard vigil crisis.
I don’t, however, think that Dick should resign. Sadiq Khan is right to institute an independent inquiry of the policing of the vigil/protest. My view, from watching the TV footage, is that the police would have done better to have kept back and not treated the outpouring of grief and anger at an especially tragic and vicious murder as if it were an illegal rave.
But this was clearly an operational matter, with difficult policing decisions taken not only in the heat of the moment, but in the middle of a pandemic where all such gatherings are illegal. Yet even if the inquiry agrees with this view, the right course is an apology, restitution for those arrested, and a pledge to learn lessons—not replacing Dick with another Met Commissioner who will probably be no better, just less experienced.
Cressida Dick’s virtue, to my mind, is precisely that she does not behave like Cleopatra. She reminds me a bit of Angela Merkel: quietly effective yet understated, a leadership style we could do more of. The last thing London needs is a Met Commissioner in the image of Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Oh, and I read of Sir Richard Mayne: “he became increasingly aloof and distant from both the public and his men, instructing them to enforce regulations that were seen by many as petty and unnecessary, such as forbidding children to throw snowballs in public places.” We can guess how he would have policed the vigil.
Burying Boris’s bridge
The unwritten story this week is how Sir Peter Hendy, commissioned by Boris to report on “infrastructure to strengthen the United Kingdom,” deftly buried Boris’s absurd bridge across the Irish Sea.
His report, smuggled out last Thursday, rightly prioritises HS2 to Scotland and, within Ireland, new rail and road links from Derry to Belfast and Dublin. Infrastructure connecting Catholic Derry to the rest of Northern Ireland has been shamefully neglected for a century, and so too Dublin-Belfast links.
Boris’s Irish Sea bridge or tunnel is relegated to a “technical assessment.”
Within Great Britain, getting HS2 trains direct from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh as soon as possible, taking no more than three hours, is the single biggest contribution that infrastructure can make to the Union. It is absolutely doable and it should be a national priority. Instead, Boris’s Treasury has put an indefinite delay on the eastern leg of HS2 to Leeds, which is essential to getting HS2 trains to Edinburgh.
As the prime minister used to declaim at Eton: “Medice, cura te ipsu” (physician, heal thyself).
Go Big
Great to hear that my friend Ed Miliband is about to publish a book entitled Go Big, with “20 transformative solutions to fix our world,” although struggling Keir Starmer may not be quite so keen on the backseat advice.
So far as this bit of our world is concerned, the top big solution should of course be for Britain to rejoin the European Union, in the week it was revealed that British exports to the EU fell by an astonishing 40 per cent after the start of Brexit in January.
Somehow I don’t think Red Wall Ed, who voted for Boris’s disastrous Brexit deal, will be saying this. Maybe his book should be retitled: Go Big—but not here.
