It deserves quoting the allowed four paras:
Farewell, Cressida Dick, the Met chief only interested in one thing: ignoring bad coppers
Dick seemed more angered by poor policing on TV than in real life. She’ll be missed by her friends in government, if no one else
Cressida Dick absolutely despised Line of Duty. The endlessly promoted Metropolitan police chief really crossed the road to tip on the BBC smash hit – so tellingly incensed by a show about sidelined cops doing the painful and unpopular work of rooting out bad apples. As Dame Cressida finally resigns from the spoilt barrel of the Met, I couldn’t help but recall
a 2019 Radio Times interview in which she expanded on her issues.
“I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is,” Dick told the magazine. “It’s so far from that. The standards and professionalism are so high.” Mmm. It was left to the show’s creator, Jed Mercurio, to offer a little background. “My inspiration for creating Line of Duty was @metpoliceuk shooting an innocent man and their dishonesty in the aftermath,” he explained icily, “so thanks to Cressida Dick for reminding me of our connection.” Dick, of course, ran the bungled counterterrorism operation that resulted in Met officers fatally shooting
Jean Charles de Menezes, an entirely innocent 27-year-old electrician.
But oddly – indeed, bizarrely – that wasn’t the only Mercurio creation the Met chief had issues with. Both in the Radio Times interview and in an earlier outing on GMB, she added that she’d had to switch off the BBC’s Bodyguard – at the time, the most watched drama since current records began – because she couldn’t handle the mere idea of the two protagonists beginning a sexual relationship. As she put it: “The moment when the home secretary made a pass at the protection officer was just beyond me, I’m afraid.” And yet, beyond her how? Beyond her why? In recent memory, a police protection officer had been dismissed for allegedly having an affair with the wife of the then home secretary,
Alan Johnson. At the time, the special operations directorate to which he reported
was being run by one Cressida Dick.
Forgive me for beginning by focusing on Dick’s outrage about entirely fictional events, when she appeared to experience only mild displeasure at so many hideously real situations involving her officers. But Dame Cressida’s telly critiques unwittingly revealed her most deadly flaws: a total failure of imagination, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and a total loyalty to officers that superseded all else. The public came a very distant second, and increasingly knew it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/11/farewell-cressida-dick-the-met-chief-only-interested-in-one-thing-ignoring-bad-coppers
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