Cressida Dick: Can the Met Police chief survive the fallout from the Sarah Everard case?

As they say on the TV cop shows, I have reason to believe that Dame Cressida Rose Dick, 60, of New Scotland Yard, London, is not rightfully entitled to be commissioner of police of the metropolis. A startling claim, yes, and one that bears satirical comparison with the “birther” conspiracies surrounding Barack Obama. But I have a confession from the female suspect, and indeed it suggests a conspiracy with the Metropolitan Police nurse who examined the prime suspect for her fitness and eligibility to join the force, in or around 1983. In her own witness statement given to Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs, Commissioner Dick admitted: “I was and am, relatively speaking, quite short of stature. At that time you had to be 5ft 4in, and only really got in because I think the nurse helped me and I’d been stretching a lot for days before.”

Quite the revelation, you’ll agree. It also points to a certain determination on her part to get into police work, which, apart from the height issue, was not an obvious choice for someone of her upper-middle class background. She studied agriculture and forestry at university because she’d spent many a happy summer on a farm in the West Country with friends of her family, and she fancied a life in the countryside, though she ended up spending “two misguided years” in chartered accountancy afterwards. She’d actually spent a week doing work experience with the Thames Valley force when she was a teenager, so there was the glimmering of curiosity, but it is quite possible that the sheer hell of audit work decisively pushed her to try a radical change, and indeed something a bit wilder. “I wanted to be involved with a much wider range of people” is how she puts it.

A practical obstacle was that she was too short for many forces, and Thames Valley rejected her, but she wasn’t going to let any of that stand in her way. She had found her vocation, and that same doggedness has served her well ever since, not least in the recent controversy about the handling of the Sarah Everard vigil and subsequent march. Her unusual gift, essential for her role, is that she manages to mix a certain steeliness with compassion. She insists, for example, that she herself would have gone to the vigil at Clapham Common, but the gatherings were illegal; her officers did nothing wrong, she says, but there will be a review.

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Since Dick took over as commissioner in 2017, she has had to deal with: the London Bridge, Westminster and Finsbury Park mosque terror attacks; the Grenfell fire investigation; an upsurge in moped mugging and stubbornly high knife crime; county lines drug gangs; arguments about stop and search and institutional racism; the backwash of the failure of Operation Midland and the alleged historical VIP sex abuse cases; cyber attacks; the Skripals; Extinction Rebellion paralysing the capital; Black Lives Matter; the statues wars; and, erm, a pandemic. Every month or two something flares up and there are calls for the commissioner to quit. Often performatively, the home secretary, the mayor of London and even the prime minister will publicly ask for explanations and call her in for interrogation. The fact that it is a serving police officer who has been charged in the Sarah Everard case has added to the tensions and the stress of the job, but through it all Dick has kept her cool. Indeed, tellingly, it is said that she has never raised her voice. It must be doubly frustrating for Dick and her officers to know that their greatest achievements are invisible – the terrorist atrocities that are averted, the lives saved because of a successful surveillance operation against the drugs trade, the stalker apprehended before they have the chance to murder. No one hears the bombs that didn’t go off.

The commissioner is resilient, and some of that she herself puts down to her family background. In many ways, at least superficially, hers was an extremely privileged upbringing. Her parents were both Oxford academics, for a start, and she enjoyed an excellent education – Dragon prep school (fee-paying) followed by Oxford High School and then Balliol College Oxford, where her father, Marcus Dick, had been a fellow in philosophy. Professor Dick, a logician, was something of a character at the time, and was freewheeling enough to ditch Oxford to become the first professor of philosophy at the newly founded University of East Anglia, in 1963. He apparently enjoyed himself, there, one contemporary later remarking that “the excitement of the early years at UEA reminded him of Monty’s headquarters in the desert”. He is certainly a contrast to his daughter, so far as anyone can tell. According to one account: “There was an attractive, worldly, raffish side to his personality – his baggy clothes, 1930s Balliol shuffle and knowing, leery smile. He smoked too much but was unflappable.” Another described as him as “one of the new kind of don; they gave tutorials with a bottle of whiskey by the armchair”. His daughter Cressida remembers him as a good-looking man, who drank and smoked too much and “had his demons”. He didn’t bother God.

The home was one full of activity and music, and little Cressida used to enjoy ballet records: she would “dance around the pink carpet” to Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Little Swans”. Her mother seems to have been the “biggest influence”, as she says, on her, through she was “shy”, “brilliant but stoical”. Cecilia Dick, née Buxton, was a history tutor at Lady Margaret Hall and went on to become a founder of Wolfson, a modern graduate college, in the 1960s, and she enjoyed a successful career there. She passed away in 1995, and the Times obituary was more acerbic than it needed to be: “A shy private person, she came from a liberal family background, and was at times tryingly democratic in her views”. Funnily enough she used to give seminars on Sir Robert Peel, who founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829, and who Cressida freely quotes approvingly today. It was he, indeed, who first put about progressive ideas such as that the service needed to use minimum force, police by consent, and reflect the society it serves – “the police are the public, and the public are the police”.

The Dicks, then, were a well-off (well, very well-connected) clan of latter-day English gentry, and Cressida had a deputy lord lieutenant of Essex for a grandad, the permanent secretary to the Treasury for an uncle, and further back her ancestors campaigned against slavery and one owned a bank. You get the picture. When the Daily Mail welcomed her conquering another “fallen male bastion” it was a bit sexist to call Ms Dick a “blue stocking”, but it had a certain authentic period ring to it and her upbringing. But emotionally it must have been much less comfortable or stable. By the time Cressida was six her parents had separated and divorced, and her father and grandmother died when she was about 11 years of age. Her mother, Cressida recalls, “had to make sacrifices to bring the three of us up” (Cressida was the youngest child, after her brother, Jasper, and sister Catherine, the eldest). She remembers a “waste not, want not” almost wartime atmosphere, the occasional meal of nettle soup, and the studied belief that every part of any slaughtered beast was there to be eaten: she went vegetarian by the time was she was 20. Cecilia taught her to be independent, and so she is.

“Cress”, as she prefers, has the confidence, and bravery, to stick up for herself and her officers even as they are assailed from both sides of politics. Dick, in the controversy over the policing of the Clapham Common vigil, criticised “armchair” experts who think they know how to deal with public order better than her team does. She uses facts and an always firm grip on detail to flatten the usual myths that emerge about bias and the “whataboutery” that disfigures so much discussion of policing. She does her best to prove that she, an openly gay woman, is neither some kind of misogynist racist nor woke warrior. After all, the caricatures cannot both be right. For her part the commisioner sees no contradiction between wanting to “put the fear back into the criminal” and wanting a diverse workforce, because she thinks diversity adds to effectiveness.

The commissioner is balanced both in terms of her equable temperament and in her defence of her “police persons”, as she sometimes refers to them. She doesn’t let herself or her officers down by “losing it”, which is a trait she has learned in her near four decades in policing. She is a “political” leader in the best sense, because, these days more than ever, the police service has to carry political support, and she tries to appeal to the authoritarian right and the liberal left. The downside is that they can both find something they don’t like in her words and actions.

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Thus, she believes that the charge that the Met is “institutionally racist”, levelled in the Macpherson report into the tragic case of Stephen Lawrence is “not helpful”, but she also recognises that the report “vastly improved the Met’s work”, and she has a “zero tolerance” sacking policy on racism. Dick still uses the term “Islamist terrorist”, but is equally clearsighted about the danger of far right extremism. She recognises that Extinction Rebellion has a right to protest, but lawfully, and insists that people also have a right to go about their business. She’s made enemies by saying the Black Lives Protests were “mostly peaceful”, and that “the George Floyd killing was absolutely awful to watch and has sparked this extraordinary global movement that has given some exciting opportunities, but also given people an impression of policing that is not the way things are here”. So she also thinks some BLM-linked protests were “dreadful” and “disgraceful”. She defended her officers who were slated for “taking the knee” while on duty because they wished to show respect and “humility”, but adds that she herself would not do so, and it will not happen again.

There were other high-profile complaints. The officers who pulled over the athlete Bianca Williams were right to do so, says Dick, having reviewed video footage, but she still apologised to Williams for any offence caused – with some claiming she’d thrown her staff under the bus. Dick remains an enthusiastic supporter of stop-and-search, because it saves black lives in her view. What’s more, “Somewhere between 23 and 25 per cent of those we stop have something on them they shouldn't have and that's the same whether they're black, white or Asian.” It is not a universally shared outlook. As with any constable trying to break up a brawl in a boozer “in many situations the police can’t win” and their role means they are bound to be unpopular with those they arrest (and those who write the unworkable laws the police try to enforce).

There is one incident that almost finished her career, and which keeps being brought up, and one that she says she thinks about “very often” to this day. The death of Jean Charles de Menezes at the hands of armed police in 2005 was a blunder she can never escape from. It was a case of mistaken identity, when the blameless Brazilian electrician was shot to death by armed officers at Stockwell Tube station. The armed officers believed him to be a fugitive suicide bomber who had escaped from the the 7/7 attacks the previous day. Dick was the “gold commander” on the botched operation, and immediate lethal force – a shot to the head – was supposedly required because any other action risked setting off the suicide jacket. It emerged during the subsequent inquiries that an officer had deleted a note of an instruction from Dick stating “CD – can run on to Tube as not carrying anything”. She was personally exonerated, but the shame of it lingers, weaponised anew every time she gets into trouble, which, in the nature of the job and the climate of these times, is very often indeed.

Otherwise Dick enjoyed a mostly gilded path to the top as her potential was recognised and the prejudices and sexism slowly eroded. When she attended her high fliers course at Bramshill Police College in 1995, she was the one female out of the 10 chosen officers, and women remain in a minority in the force even now (she wants a 50/50 force but says knows it won’t be possible in her commissionship). But then again she had never let her sex define her. She was only one of two girls in her year of 60 at her first school, one of the first female undergraduates at Balliol in 1979, and of course the police was extremely male-dominated. She always played cricket, football and rowed with the boys. It never bothered her in that sense.

Later on Dick was given time out to study for a qualification in criminology at Cambridge. Her thesis, by the way, was on how the use of the police by Margaret Thatcher during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 was perceived by the public (the Met, which Dick had just then joined, didn’t enjoy a warm welcome in South Yorkshire). She was given exposure to, and responsibility for, Operation Trident (gun and gang crimes), counterterrorism, the 2012 London Olympics, and became the country’s principal hostage negotiator. After a bit of a falling-out with her predecessor, Bernard Hogan-Howe, Dick transferred for a couple of years to the “Foreign Office” (officially), her unspecified work probably revolving around spying and terrorism. When Hogan-Howe’s offer to stay on for a second term was politely turned down, the then prime minister and home secretary, Theresa May and Amber Rudd, knew just the woman for the job.

It’s been quite a plod since the diminutive WPC Dick stepped out, alone, onto her first beat patrol in London’s Soho in 1983 (the “W” prefix didn’t finally disappear until the 21st century). She says he was glad she was relatively mature before she was confronted with the sex trade and the seedier side of London life. Perhaps it was a bit of a blessing for a rookie that she has never been able to detect the smell of cannabis, something her colleagues find especially amusing. Despite her trendy parents, Dick never used drugs, and takes a dim view of those who do so “recreationally”: “There is this challenge that there are a whole group of middle class – or whatever you want to call them – people who will sit round … happily think about global warming and fair trade, and environmental protection and all sorts of things, organic food, but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine. Well, there is; there’s misery throughout the supply chain.”

WPC Dick’s first arrest was of a guy using a screwdriver to jemmy open the coin box in a telephone kiosk, when such things existed, and she had to use all her modest heft to lean on the door and hold him there until help arrived. There were few computers, rudimentary radios, card index systems, rampant homophobia and routine racism. You almost get the impression that this small, rather wiry woman saw it as her unlikely mission to change all that, and make the force as well as the world a better place. She mostly succeeded. Though her enemies might not like to hear it, being Britain’s top cop in 2021 is a question of “nicking villains”, but that involves running a large data business with a huge clientele, a ridiculously unforgiving public and politicians wanting to shade scrutiny into operational control. As she is so obviously civilised, bright and articulate she is well qualified for her role. She completes her five-year term in 2022, but could she persuaded to stick around longer? She hasn’t ruled it out, but it isn’t pushing it publicly: “I’m on a five-year contract. I so hope I get to do my whole five years. I’m loving every minute.”

Despite the disquiet over events in Clapham, Dick remains an asset. Like those other worldly wise senior public servants Chris Whitty and Andrew Bailey, Commisioner Dick is someone who understands the art of the possible. You need someone who is smart, plausible and persuasive in the job, who will be able to calm an overheated and hostile politician such as Priti Patel in a Home Office conference room just as readily as she would an EDL activist “defending” a statue of Winston Churchill. When she talks to Boris Johnson, who turned up at Balliol a few years after she left, they speak the same language. It means she can gently reprimand him for making a political speech at a cadet passing out parade; but also that she can make sure the Met gets the money it needs. Somehow she guided the Met through a £700m cut in its budget. They survived, because they had to.

Some old-style Jack Regan (off The Sweeney) telling Johnson to get his trousers on because he doesn’t know FA about being a copper just wouldn’t be as effective during the public spending review. Dick has a hinterland – she is a devotee of classical music and a fan of Thomas Hardy – and so in many ways she is much more that other policeman John Thaw played, Inspector Morse.