Policing London
It is hard to know if Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was appointed yesterday as the new Metropolitan police commissioner, deserves more congratulations or commiserations. The true answer must be a bit of both. Mr Hogan-Howe is a proven police leader who has risen to the most important job in British policing. But he has done it at a time when the force, in London as elsewhere, faces funding and staffing cuts, is struggling to recover from the phone hacking furore and the riots, and has become a plaything in a constitutional spat between a Conservative home secretary and London mayor, both of whom think the new man must also be their man. As the third Met commissioner to hold the office in less than three years, Mr Hogan-Howe will be uncomfortably aware that what goes up can come down too.
It certainly does not help that, between them, Theresa May and Boris Johnson contrived to overlook the claims of the best qualified candidate for the commissioner’s job. Sir Hugh Orde, former Northern Ireland police chief and head of the chiefs’ association Acpo, had the strongest CV in the field, as well as the strongest policing profile. He also got the backing of two official panels, one comprising civil servants and police experts and the other members of the Metropolitan police authority, both of which decided he was the best candidate for the job. But the home secretary and the mayor each decided they knew better.
Policing London
The reason for this is not hard to find, since Sir Hugh had been outspokenly clear that he would have been an independent chief, abiding by the traditional principle that the police and not the politicians take the operational decisions. If nothing else, it is a historic irony that the Conservatives – who spent decades denouncing Labour for seeking to politicise the police – have now taken a succession of Met management decisions whose political character far exceeds anything that Labour home secretaries or mayors have ever attempted. This places Mr Hogan-Howe in an unenviable position. Through no fault of his own, he will be labelled the Tories’ placeman. No Met commissioner in modern times has come to the job with less authority or legitimacy.
All this makes the new commissioner’s job even more difficult than it would have been anyway — and with the Olympics less than 11 months away. The Conservatives have blundered into the delicate and antiquated architecture of British police governance in a deplorably foolish way. The shambles they have created in London policing is a grim precedent for the politicised system they want to introduce elsewhere. Mr Hogan-Howe has our best wishes, but he has been handed a poisoned chalice.
Author: Chief Editor
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