21 March 2023 , 00:01
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The Metropolitan Police, damned as racist, homophobic and misogynistic, is drinking in the last chance saloon.
Either the tarnished force is radically and permanently reformed or it must be replaced.
There is precedent for this, when the Police Service of Northern Ireland succeeded the discredited Royal Ulster Constabulary.
With public confidence plummeting after a string of horrendous scandals – including the rape campaign by elite officer David Carrick and Wayne Couzens’ murder of Sarah Everard – Baroness Louise Casey’s report must not be put on a shelf to gather dust.
We have, alas, been here before.
Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade
It is dispiriting to recall that in 1999 the Macpherson Report after the murder of Stephen Lawrence also branded the Met institutionally racist.
Wayne Couzens is in prison of the murder of Sarah Everard (PA)
David Carrick, 48, was jailed for dozens of rape and sexual offences against 12 women (REX/Shutterstock)The report was supposed to have triggered a fresh start for the force.
It does not seem to have worked. What we must avoid at all costs is another false start.
Grill him hard
This was the Mirror's front page on December 1, 2021 (Daily Mirror)Boris Johnson is again playing fast and loose with the truth.
The woeful former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary disgraced the great offices of state he held. It is nauseating, if entirely predictable, that Johnson ignores verifiable facts – such as a fixed penalty for a Covid rule-breaking party – to insist he’s innocent.
The smearing of a Commons all-party Privileges Committee (with a Tory majority) by faithful apologists for ousted Johnson must be close to contempt of Parliament.
On Wednesday we will see Johnson himself grilled. He will try his usual tricks but he will be quaking – because he faces the most humiliating fall from grace of any ex-PM in history.
Don’t be dire..
Danny Dyer looks unrecognisable with long hair and stacheWe hope Danny Dyer can manage the jump from playing a soap hardman to his role in a Jilly Cooper bonkbuster.
Author Jilly calls his character Freddie Jones “instinctively courteous” – the exact opposite of EastEnders landlord Mick Carter.