FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’

YOU may well ask: are we safe in our beds? Who will catch the thieves or silence the slanderers and the blackmailers? All characteristics very familiar in the modern Scotland Yard. The lights are not burning late in Whitehall,  they’ve gone out in Scotland Yard just like those in the News of the World.

There are sweeter smells in a sewage farm but all is not lost.

Now a plum job has become vacant. Salary £270,000 a year, plus accommodation, free transport, perks and the goodwill of the London Citizenry. Qualification required is the ability to “keep the Queen’s Peace”, the ability to ride a horse in state processions, protect Her Majesty’s family and diplomats assigned to the Court of St James.

The successful candidate will have a budget of £3billion and a staff of more than 50,000.

I’ve known several of them, but not the latest, Sir Paul Stephenson, who resigned on Sunday. 

His ultimate goodbye was terse and tense: “That’s it”. A hint of menace? No. 

Obviously his five-week free recuperation in Tring prepared him for the scaffold. Did you note the order that he informed his employers – the Palace, the Home Secretary and then the Mayor and chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The Met was established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 to deal with the explosive growth of London’s population. 

And little had changed in its structure for more than 150 years. A virtual arm of government, aloof, occasionally answerable to Parliament through the Home Secretary. 

And characterised in books TV and film as incorruptible and infallible.

I caused a storm in Paddington Borough Council in 1961 by proposing a motion that we refuse to pay our police precept (the part of the rates to fund the police).

I reasoned a large payment merited accountability to the law-abiding citizens of Paddington. 

It’s no use being a failed prophet but, come 1981, we formed the Police Committee of the Greater London Council which the Met acknowledged.

I sat at the heart of London local government for more than 40 years and I made it my business to know what was going on in the minds of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Police for the Metropolis.

Standing with others, as the strong arm of the Met began to evict Don Cook leader of the St Pancras rent strike from his Kentish Town flat in 1960, I spotted Sir Joseph Simpson the incumbent and admonished him. I told him Cook was a communist and a war hero in the Paras and did not deserve this treatment. Sir Joseph had not been blessed with the gift of tongues and grunted like an emasculated rhinoceros, but I did not make my excuses and leave but was removed from the sepulchral presence. 

Shortly afterwards a riot erupted. 

Who remembers Sir John Waldron, the nearest we got to Dr Watson? He moulded himself on a golf-playing man holding a tin of rich tobacco and a tweed suit.

Sir Robert Mark I knew very well and liked. Early in the 1970s, when I led for Labour, I had a periodic dinner with him and the other senior people responsible for the governance of London. He launched Operation Ploughman – partly successful in uncovering corruption. 

A puritanical man he had an unusual hobby at the time I knew him – his daughter was teaching him the cello.

Bob died this year in Esher. 

He was a good man who tried to wrestle the serpents within the Yard to the ground.

Then we had Sir David McNee the Hammer of the Scots and Wee Free man. I told him I could get him a good deal on a stretch of the Usk for flyfishing. I thought it in the public interest for him not to be in London..

Sir Kenneth Newman came into my sights when he was in charge of Notting Hill and North Kensington when the most violent and vicious race riots broke out.

He was no hard nut. He had been head of the Northern Ireland Constabulary but did nothing about the B-Specials, who were particularly vicious to the Roman Catholic community. 

He said nothing because he had nothing to say.

He arrrived at the closing stages of the Broadwater Farm riots when Constable Keith Blakelock was brutally murdered. 

Every policeman at the incident turned their backs on him.

Sir Paul Condon was ridiculed because of his name. He came to us from rural Kent, a gentle Roman Catholic more suited to theological research behind the secure walls of the Vatican. 

Then came Sir John Stevens the Indiana Jones of those cruel streets. Pilot, rock climber, swimmer, chaste, cold shower every morning, evangelical. 

Like John the Baptist he prepared the way for Sir Ian Blair. 

He was forgettable – the Cellophane man. Never a hair out of place. He danced the night away while the cash for honours and phone hacking were filed neatly away in the no-action tray.

Sir Paul Stephenson has been run over not by one but by two Clapham omnibuses while excitable Andy Hayman and the studious John Yates are out in the cold.

Admirable candidates for a provincial production of Cinderella. 

Two ugly sisters if I ever clapped eyes on them.

That tired institution is easily recognisable in The Beggar’s Opera… and in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. There’s Mack the Knife and Colonel “Tiger” Brown, the head of the police, whom Queen Victoria reprieves from execution and grants a large pension. 

Published: 21 July, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON