Cressida Dick: Love says never having to mean you're sorry
To forgive is divine, writes George Pitcher, but the Chief Commissioner has erred so often that her penitence has no meaning
“I am so sorry,” intoned Dame Cressida Dick, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, after a whole-life sentence was passed down on one of her serving police officers – I think the only name that should be used henceforward is that of his victim – for the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
And? In the absence of further expiation, it’s difficult to know what she meant by this four-word phrase that concluded her address to reporters outside the Old Bailey. Is she sorry in the way that we tell bereaved people that we’re sorry, in the sense that we’re sorry for them and for their loss? Is she sorry because her force allowed a psychopath and sexual abuser into its ranks, grossly to betray the trust of the public she serves? Importantly, is she sorry because she thinks all this is her fault?
Alien concept
The last of those propositions must be unlikely, as she would have resigned her post at the conclusion of her short speech. But if saying sorry for Dick is a professional role as rare as hen dentistry, then resignation is an entirely alien concept.
To recap: She presided over the system of recruitment and promotion to armed-protection units of Everard’s murderer, someone that cursory checks would have revealed indecently exposed himself on more than one occasion and participated with other serving officers in grotesque misogynistic messaging. Almost beyond belief is that this happened because the Met didn’t start vetting applicants’ social-media accounts until a year ago.
That might have given grounds for someone in Dick’s position to resign. But she says she has “a job to do”, having arguably not done it. She adds “I’ll handle it”, pitching herself as part of the solution, having even more arguably been part of the problem. And she’s not stepping down any time soon.
In police argot, she has form in failing to resign. As Gold Commander of an anti-terrorist operation in 2005, described by her own officers as “chaotic”, an innocent young commuter, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot dead by police on the London Underground. Dick said at his inquest that she thinks of him “quite often”. One expects his family does too.
Dick has publicly defended the senior officer in charge of Operation Midland, the ludicrous police investigation, with which she was directly involved as assistant commissioner, into Carl Beech’s crazed allegations about a child-abuse and murder ring at the heart of the British establishment. When it collapsed in 2016, Lady Brittan, widow of Lord (Leon) Brittan who died under suspicion of that inquiry, castigated Dick for presiding over “a culture of cover-up and flick away”.
Dick has presided over the Met’s shambolic response to Extinction Rebellion’s close-downs of central London in 2019 and 2020, the latter being the disruptions of the Remembrance Day commemorations. Criticism wasn’t so much about XR’s right to demonstrate – the Met just didn’t really turn up.
“Armchair critics”
She was in charge when police officers broke up the vigil for Everard on Clapham Common, yielding scenes of police kneeling on women protesters and – in now almost unbearable resonance of how it emerged that Everard was abducted – handcuffing them. Dick’s response? “Armchair critics,” she said.
During the summer, Dick was censured in the long-awaited report into private investigator Daniel Morgan’s murder in 1987 for personally obstructing the inquiry and her Met for being “institutionally corrupt”. Shortly afterwards, thousands of football fans smashed their way into Wembley Stadium when, again, the Met barely showed up, endangering lives and the chances of London hosting the 2030 World Cup.
Other than that, Dick’s done a grand job.
Any one of these incidents and factors might have led someone in Dick’s position to consider their position. One thinks of Lord Carrington when the Falklands were invaded in 1982 – not directly his fault, but he presided over a Foreign Office that was criticised for its culture of complacency. He understood where the buck stopped.
That Dick demonstrably doesn’t may have not a little to do with the example that is set for her. She serves under Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has broken the ministerial code up to three times without – extraordinarily – feeling the need to resign and who, in turn, serves under a prime minister whose attitude to legality resembles that of the kind of lags whose collars should get felt by Dick’s officers.
Bastard sibling
Her apology outside the Old Bailey must perforce have been an expression of contrition of some sort. And, according to our ancient religion, contrition is the first step on the path to forgiveness. But, in the catholic tradition at any rate, contrition has a bastard sibling known as attrition.
This is an act of hypocrisy aimed at gaining something other than forgiveness – it’s the kind of show-boating apology that the famous Roman Catholic convert Tony Blair made on behalf of Britain in 2007 for its role in the slave trade, a crime for which he had no right to apologise. Is that what Dick was doing?
Moreover, contrition requires penance to be sincere and we can’t know for what Dick is repenting unless she tells us, which she won’t. Again from the catholic tradition – the Anglican and protestant traditions (the two are different things) don’t require this – satisfaction is required. In this context, satisfaction means making amends for what has been done wrong, through doing what is right. Think Jack Profumo, dedicating his life, after lying to parliament about his affair with Christine Keeler, to working with Toynbee Hall in London’s East End to alleviate its poverty.
Repeat offender
Of course, Dick may feel that the best way for her satisfactorily to make amends is to stay in post and fix the Met. But the very purpose of listing her breaches in that role in such detail above is to demonstrate that she’s a recidivist, a repeat offender – there’s now sufficient evidence that the best way for her to make amends is to stand aside and let someone else sort it out.
This is not to say that Dick is a bad woman (nor is she trivial). To err is human – and her career has demonstrated just how human she is. But if forgiveness is divine, then it is also, in absolution, a sacrament, an act of love.
Dick’s dogged determination to hold onto her office makes it hard to see how she can square that circle. Perhaps she just loves her job too much. If that is so, then in her world love says you never have to mean you’re sorry.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest