I’m married to Bear. She’s wonderful.

At the start of this week, we celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary: eighteen years spent in the company of my best friend; eighteen years spent listening and learning and having the rough edges rubbed off me.

Back in 2002, in the weeks leading up to our wedding, we signed up for one of those marriage preparation courses – a series of sessions designed to get us ready for the big day and all the adventures that lay beyond. The chosen subject for one of those sessions was communication and, during it, we were taught about two specific words that you ought to make every effort to avoid using in any relationship:

‘Always’ and ‘Never’.

Eighteen years along the road, I can attest to the wisdom of that advice.

You know how things can begin to unravel when you find yourself falling out with the person you love most in the world:

“You never take my concerns seriously…”

“You always try to fix things when all I want you to do is listen…”

“You always leave your dirty stuff on the floor…”

“You never...

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I’m struggling for words – struggling to write anything coherent. The best I seem to be able to manage is this collection of thoughts about the killing of George Floyd…

• The greatest duty – the greatest privilege – that any police officer could ever have is to save the life of another human being.
• The killing of George Floyd represents an absolute betrayal of everything I have ever believed in – everything I ever stood for as a police officer.
• And I know that every good police officer I have ever known would say exactly the same.
• But the thing is that it’s not just George Floyd. It’s every other case as well. Every other story. Every other piece of history.
• Because this has been going on – in one form or another – for hundreds of years.
• At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Britain is not America. And British policing is not remotely the same as American policing. But that doesn’t for one moment mean that there’s nothing to see here. There’s a whole host of things we’ve got wrong too.
• Stephen Lawrence was murdered...
  
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Yesterday

Yesterday, the Prime Minister gave a pre-recorded speech in which he attempted to explain the government’s latest strategy for responding to the pandemic. Stay Alert, we were told. But a soundbite does not a strategy make and, mostly, he seems only to have confused people (including senior members of his own government).

“Stay at home as much as possible.”

“Work from home if you can.”

“Limit contact with other people.”

What do these statements even mean? They are so subjective as to be rendered almost meaningless. 

But, as ever, police officers out on patrol will be expected to interpret and apply them. And some will accuse those officers of being heavy-handed in doing so, while others will accuse them of not doing enough. 

A Copper’s Lot is to be caught in the middle, trying to make sense of things that make almost no sense at all.

The Last Few Days

Last week, the nation marked the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Friday evening’s BBC broadcast included a beautiful musical tribute to key workers and members of the...

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These days, I find it incredibly difficult to watch video footage of confrontation involving police officers. Too many memories I suppose.

Yesterday though, I caught sight of the clip that was circulating on social media – of a black father being tasered by police officers in front of his young son. I could only watch it once – and once was almost too much. 

I found it enormously distressing – for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because of the child. The image of him kicking his little legs in obvious distress as the officer picks him up has been playing on a loop in my mind.

Before I go any further, I should make clear that I’m not going to offer any comment on the specific police actions shown in the film. Given the fact that there’s an independent investigation underway, it would be enormously irresponsible to do so. In any case, I wasn’t there. And I’m not taser trained. And I don’t know all the facts. Trials conducted in the ten-second-court of online opinion have never been a good idea.

But neither can I ignore the significant...

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I want to tell you a short story about a group of extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, during these extraordinary times. You might not have heard of them before.

If you were to meet any of the police officers (from the Met, City of London Police & BTP), firefighters and NHS staff who are members of London’s Pandemic Multi-Agency Response Team (PMART), they would no doubt try to tell you that they aren’t extraordinary at all. I suspect they would say that they are just doing their job. They might even make reference to that precious, old-fashioned thing called duty. Even so, I want to pause for a moment to acknowledge and salute them.

Each afternoon in recent times, we have been faced with the latest heartbreaking headlines – an update on the number of those who have died in hospital from Coronavirus. The official total is fast approaching 20,000, and behind every number is a name. A family. A story. But what the published total doesn’t include is the number of those who have died from...

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On Friday it was 980. Nine hundred & eighty souls.

On Saturday, it was 917. Nine hundred & seventeen souls.

Those are the numbers of people who have died from coronavirus in just two days. Just in this country. Actually, those are the numbers of people who died in hospital. The totals don’t include those who died at home, or in a care home, or anywhere else. The reality – the final toll – will undoubtedly be significantly higher.

It is an unimaginable horror story, playing out in real time all around us. The overwhelming loss of life. The sheer unbearable scale of it all. The inevitability that thousands more will die.

At Hillsborough, 96 precious lives were lost. On 7/7, 52 precious lives were lost. At Lockerbie, 270 precious lives were lost. When the Marchioness went down, 51 precious lives were lost. When the Herald of Free Enterprise capsized, 193 precious lives were lost. Five human catastrophes that happened in my lifetime, each of them seared into the national consciousness. I remember them all. Taken together, a total of 662 precious...

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People are feeling afraid.

Afraid of getting sick.

Afraid of dying.

Afraid of losing loved ones.

Afraid of being left alone.

Afraid of losing their jobs.

Afraid of not being able to pay the rent.

Afraid of not having enough.

Afraid of the unknown.

People are feeling really, really afraid. 

And fear is a little bit like a virus. It attaches itself to living cells and spreads relentlessly from one host to the next, causing immeasurable harm as it does so. Fear is dangerously infectious – and the realisation of that fact must surely lead us to search for a cure.

But is there a cure for fear?

There are certainly all sorts of things that might help us to feel less afraid. Things like:

• Facts: understanding what it is we’re dealing with.
• Advice: understanding what we need to do by way of a response.
• Provision: of adequate protective equipment and medical supplies.
• Reassurance: being told by people we trust that there will be enough food and other essentials to go round; being told that, in the end, this too shall pass.

Each of those things is...

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Who doesn’t love a good list?

And since today is my 50th birthday, I thought I’d come up with 50 things I’ve learned along the way.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

1. Love is everything
2. Marrying my best friend was one of my better life decisions
3. Being a dad is a privilege 
4. Every contact leaves a trace
5. Kindness is not weakness 
6. It is never the critic who counts
7. The Spitfire is quite possibly the most beautiful object ever made
8. Religion and faith are not the same thing
9. Peanut M&Ms are entirely delicious
10. For more than 25 years, I worked with heroes
11. The West Wing is the finest TV show ever made
12. And The Shawshank Redemption is the finest film
13. Hope is a good thing
14. Enough talk of ‘arriving’. Its always been about the journey
15. Never trust a person who walks without a limp
16. Kenny Dalglish is the greatest footballer I ever saw play
17. Anfield on a European night takes your breath away
18. Doing the wrong thing faster won’t get the right thing done
19. If all you possess is an armchair and an opinion, it might be better to stay seated and silent
20. Dogs ought to be...
    
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Today was one of those unexpected days.

I found myself on stage at the Cambridge Theatre – home of Matilda The Musical – talking to an audience of a thousand people about my new book. There were a number of writers there – including Sarfraz Manzoor, Rachel Clarke, Matthew Syed and Jess Phillips – and we were each given five minutes to say a few words.

This was my script…

***

I’m a husband to one, a dad to three and – for more than twenty-five years – I served in the Metropolitan Police. It was my duty and my joy. 

When you strip away all that really isn’t important, the job of a police officer is just about as extraordinary as a job could ever be. It is:

• To save lives
• To find the lost
• To bind up the broken-boned and broken-hearted
• To step into harm’s way in defence of complete strangers
• Sometimes, to risk it all

If you were to ask most coppers why they joined, they would tell you, simply, that they wanted to make a difference… that they wanted to change the world.

The painful privilege of policing is to see all of life and all of death...

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I have already cast my vote. 

I will be away from home on Election Day, so I sent it in by post. 

And I really struggled with where to where to put my ‘X’. The truth is that I didn’t want to support any of them; that I feel completely betrayed by all of them. Voting matters though and so I gave my support to the candidate who appeared to me to represent the least worst option.

But it wasn’t much of a choice. (And, by the way, how on earth did we end up in a place where ‘least worst option’ was the best that anyone could offer.)

The Conservative-led governments of the last ten years have:

• Decimated policing (cutting 44,000 officers and staff between 2010-18)
• Decimated the criminal justice system
• Decimated the prison system
• Decimated the probation service
• Decimated pretty much every other part of the public sector
• Overseen a catastrophic increase in child poverty
• Overseen a catastrophic increase in homelessness
• Overseen a catastrophic increase in Foodbank use

And so it goes on.

Austerity was a conscious, deliberate political...

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