What a Dick

Oh so now everyone realises how awful the Met chief was

Cressida Dick was hugely popular with the rank and file, we're repeatedly told. As if it's a good thing.

If Dick were head of a big company, she'd be the boss who introduces wine-time Fridays, unlimited free food for all in a canteen with cordon bleu chefs. billions of beanbags, ball pools, thought pods and all the fripperies that substitute for treating employees as adults.

She lets the marketing, blue sky, make work and customer engagement departments expand and proliferate unchecked, according to Parkinson's law. She scouts for small, vaguely germane start-ups and pays way over the odds to gobble them up into the giant corporation's maw. The department that actually makes the product that the company sells -- the only source of income it has -- is allowed to wither and made to feel antiquated and silly. The only time customer engagement engages with a customer is when she is still head of the department, before her demonically assisted ascent is complete, and a few of the staff go out and shoot a customer in the head. They are all let off without sanction, and she seems only to benefit from the episode.

All the employees would love her. The only people who would be unhappy are the owners of the company. The shareholders. Or, in the case of the Metropolitan police, the public.

No one has done more than Dick to undermine Robert Peel's principle that the police are the public are the police. That is why officers have apparently become so detached and cynical on her watch: the sense of us and them has led them to see us as customers. And it's a truism that, for the staff of badly run companies, customers soon become viewed as an incessant and idiotic nuisance. What a disgusting travesty that it is Peel's beloved force that Dick has perverted.

One thing to be cautiously optimistic about. If The Guardian is right, at least the frontrunners to replace her don't include Simon "Burqa" Bailey. But as we've been saying for ages, Dick should never have got anywhere near power.