The rotten apple at the Metropolitan Police is right at the top

I would have preferred to see the policeman in the Village People in charge

"Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, left, is one of the greatest failures in recent British policing" (Getty)

Something historic is happening. Usually the captain goes down with the ship. In the case of the Metropolitan Police, the ship is going down with the captain. The career of commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe is sinking to watery depths, and he is dragging the force down with him.

The Met’s refusal to apologise to Lord Bramall for his public persecution was refreshingly clear. The Met defended its legal right to be cruel, it defended its legal right to be stupid, and it continues to exercise those rights.

Boris Johnson proposes to give the commissioner a one-year extension of his contract. Hogan-Howe is one of the greatest failures in recent British policing, but the Mayor proposes to reward that failure. The Mayor and I have different standards. I would have preferred Victor Willis, the policeman in the Village People. At least he has added to the sum total of human happiness.

The British police and Crown Prosecution Service claim that because it takes courage for an abused person to come forward, all those who do so must be telling the truth. This is not logical. As with the genuinely abused it takes courage for a fantasist to come forward. The courage is the same; the accuracy is not. For all we know, “Nick”, the defamer of Lord Bramall, Edward Heath and Harvey Proctor, may believe what he says, but an overwhelming majority of the recent accusations against public personalities have been false, many preposterously so. Yet the police insist on treating them at face value before doing their homework. They have allowed sentimentality to trump intellectual rigour.

The police have taken seriously claims about a room that had not yet been built, a television programme that had not yet been broadcast, an automobile that had not yet been invented, murder victims who never lived, a perpetrator who did not yet exist, a basement apartment that was on an upper floor, friends who had not yet met and friends who were enemies. How can we take the British police seriously any more? Millions of pounds could have been saved if the police had taken 10 seconds to check Wikipedia or examined their clients’ past histories of false accusations.

Lord Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. He thought someone should take responsibility. Nobody in Met seems interested in taking responsibility for error. I feel desperately sorry for the thousands of honest, hard-working police officers who devoted their careers to justice, only to be betrayed by leaders who have made good people do bad things. They should be saluted for their public service, rather than associated with a force whose best excuse for tormenting Britain’s greatest living war hero is that it has the right to be wrong.

Many serving officers in the Metropolitan Police are distressed by the course of their organisation. It is time for these good men and women to throw the skipper overboard.