Cressida Dick faces a barrage of fresh criticism over ‘nonsense’ Partygate probe

154

View
comments

Cressida Dick faced a barrage of fresh criticism yesterday over the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into Partygate – including claims that she had thrown common sense ‘out of the window’.

The Met Commissioner was accused by senior former officer Dai Davies of launching a ‘nonsense’ inquiry into offences that were ‘not serious’.

In a scathing verdict on the decision to launch an inquiry into events held at Downing Street that allegedly breached coronavirus rules, the former chief superintendent and divisional commander told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It’s a mess and there’s no way around that. Common sense seems to have gone completely out of the window.

‘It’s got to be proportionate, and people at work sharing a cake or having a drink, where they’re working all day, and then launching a criminal inquiry over that, that is not proportionate.’

Separately, Nazir Afzal – former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North-West England – called on Dame Cressida to resign ‘or risk damaging the public’s trust in the police beyond repair’. In an article for this paper, below, he added: ‘Her lack of self-awareness is mind-blowing.’

And the Commissioner also faced criticism from Conservative MPs, who said the No10 party investigation was a ‘deplorable’ waste of public money given the scale of crime in London.

Hendon MP Matthew Offord said: ‘With an epidemic of knife crime hitting a record high in the last year, I would have thought the priorities of the Metropolitan Police should be focused upon keeping Londoners safe rather than on incidents that happened at Downing Street in the past. 

‘While kids are dying on the streets of London, their priority should be addressing that.’

Tory colleague Peter Bone said the Met inquiry was a ‘deplorable waste of police resources’. He added that Scotland Yard ‘should be focusing on catching hardened criminals and cracking down on the violent crime which shames parts of our capital – not launching inquiries into whether cake was served at No 10 or who drank what in the Downing Street garden.’ 

The Met’s own crime figures show that in the two years to December just ten per cent of 454,572 violent attacks on people have been solved or cleared up, along with 5.5 per cent of 114,881 burglaries and 8.7 per cent of more than 50,000 robberies.

The Met Police responded last night by repeating a statement it issued last week, explaining that it had received material from the Cabinet Office and would ‘complete our investigations promptly, fairly and proportionately’.

Only Cressida Dick would make this fiasco worse. She must quit

By Nazir Afzal OBE for the Mail On Sunday 

Dame Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has a magical ability to make a bad situation even worse.

The point was proved yet again last week with an utterly inept response to the so-called Partygate inquiry at Downing Street.

First the Met declined to investigate claims that the people making the Covid laws had broken them in flagrant terms.

Then, at the last moment, Dame Cressida announced a change of heart, claiming there may be evidence of law breaking, after all – even though she hadn’t started collecting it.

She has muzzled Sue Gray’s report for Parliament, saying it must only make ‘minimal’ reference to the parties Ms Gray is supposed to be investigating.

What rubbish. A purely factual report by Sue Gray cannot possibly prejudice a police investigation. What should have been a relatively straightforward thing – an independent report for Parliament, and a police inquiry that followed the evidence – has been complicated and confused.

Here was an opportunity for the police to finally get things right and make it clear they are investigating properly. To say that chance has been missed is an understatement.

People are aghast, and rightly so. They feel as though clear answers have been taken away from them, that the wool has been pulled over their eyes.

And, as a consequence, the public’s trust in policing has been set back more than I can measure.

Dame Cressida’s watch has been a catalogue of blunders.

Take the enormous insensitivity in the way women were treated at the vigil after the murder of Sarah Everard last March.

They were simply protesting that Sarah had been murdered by a police officer – an officer who faced allegations of previous sexual impropriety.

No wonder some women began to ask how they could trust the police.

Then came the report into the 1987 murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.

It criticised Dame Cressida personally for delaying the public inquiry because she did not disclose crucial documents.

The Met Police was subject to worldwide condemnation for its woeful policing at the Euro 2020 final at Wembley in July. A report by Baroness Casey found spectators had been exposed to significant risk of injury or death.

Meanwhile, we have suffered a plague of knife crime, record murder rates and an all-time low in the prosecution of rape charges.

How many more failings will emerge on Dame Cressida’s watch? Just what will her legacy be?

I spoke to several police officers about the Partygate inquiry last week, and they told me they just can’t understand what’s going on. They feel personally affected. There is a growing perception that we are being policed badly – particularly in London – and this is dangerous.

One of the officers I spoke to had been off-duty with his family in a coffee shop when he overheard a conversation at the next table.

‘You just can’t trust the police,’ said the speaker. ‘You don’t know what they’re up to, they’re clearly in the pocket of the Government.’

I have spent three decades trying to restore confidence in policing after allegations of corruption involving several high-profile miscarriages of justice and in the aftermath of Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

Now Dame Cressida is undoing all that painstaking work.

There are a lot of angry people in this country right now, and their anger is palpable.

They are angry because they don’t know what is going on, and what is being said and done, behind closed doors. All the Met has done is feed that anger.

It’s certainly doing Boris Johnson no favours.

This is only the second time in the history of our parliamentary democracy that the police have started investigating our political leaders – and our Prime Minister. The first came with the Cash for Honours inquiry with Tony Blair in Downing Street 15 years ago.

It is almost unprecedented, and therefore requires a confidence-building response. Cressida Dick has given us the exact opposite.

The Sue Gray report must be published in full, without redaction.

The Prime Minister must make a statement to Parliament based on that report. And the police must do their job, which is to follow the evidence and see if there’s any criminal activity that requires prosecution. It’s as simple as that.

I have already called for Cressida Dick to resign – twice. Once after Sarah Everard’s murder and then last September when, bizarrely, the Home Secretary extended her contract to April 2024.

Now I’ll make it a third time and say she should go now, or risk damaging the public’s trust in the police beyond repair. Her lack of self-awareness is mind-blowing.