I usually have a fairly straightforward response to
a book; to this one, I don’t
London’s Metropolitan Police has a reputation for
idleness, incompetence and corruption. And that’s just the official view from
numerous enquiries and investigations into its conduct. I would add servility
to the list. The Met. has never stood up to its political masters who, it
seems, will tolerate the Met’s shortcomings so long as it jumps when told to
Jump! Only recently, the Leader of the House of Lords Baroness d’Souza reported
her deputy, Lord Sewal, to the Met. for possession of class A drugs: the
evidence provided by newspapers photographs of him snorting what he obviously
believed to be cocaine. The Met. were on the case very quickly and obliged the
Baroness by breaking down the door to Lord Sewal’s flat, an event duly
publicised in those same newspapers. Now had I phoned the Met. and reported a
neighbour who I suspected of snorting coke, I think it would have been seen as
a case of wasting police time. London, after all, is the cocaine capital of
Europe (that’s official too). Busting Lord Sewal was a complete waste of police
time – it may have ticked the box, We acted on the Information, but
it was done to oblige. It's forelock tugging.
The Met. is a traditionally working class
organisation and Clive Driscoll presents himself as just an ordinary London boy
from a difficult background who, despite dyslexia, has pulled himself up by his
own bootstraps into a 35 year career with the Met. The style of the book is
aggressively uneducated. I don’t know if this is Clive Driscoll alone or as he
has been crafted by a ghost writer. The effect is sometimes comic and sometimes
toe-curling. I think it is a main reason why I sometimes felt, This is an Unreliable Narrator. (But the low
point comes when Mr Driscoll, who aims quite a few appropriate shafts at Roman Catholic church officials - spiced with reports of coded hand signals they use between themselves - then tells you that he himself is a … Freemason. That had me in stitches.)
You cannot be a Comic Cuts Dixon of Dock Green
Copper and at the same time successfully take on some very difficult
investigations and secure convictions. That is where the style of the narration clashes all the time with the stories it narrates.
DCI Driscoll’s lasting claim to fame and
gratitude arises from the fact that he took on the “Cold Case” Stephen Lawrence
murder (which dated back to 1993), secured the confidence of the murdered boy’s
parents – who provide Prefaces to this book - and others who had been bitterly
disillusioned by the mishandling of the case, and eventually secured two
convictions in 2012.
Things went wrong on the Lawrence case very early
on: one of the suspects was the son of a well-known criminal who just happened
to have a working relationship with the policeman put in charge of the murder investigation
and who saw to it that the investigation went nowhere, despite information and
evidence all over the place. Exceptionally bad luck? No, not completely untypical of the Met.
All this and a lot more is on the record. So too is
the fact that having secured the convictions, the Met. responded to Driscoll’s
success not with congratulations but by pushing him into compulsory retirement –
hence this book which though it never presents itself as such is also his
revenge.
All these negative things said, there are stories told here which are entirely credible, greatly to Mr Driscoll’s credit,
and often enough are stark reminders of what life in an “Inner City” is like for
many of its inhabitants. Some of the things narrated here deserve further scrutiny, since
the UK’s laws of libel have often enough prevented the naming of names. Mr
Driscoll’s book is at its most frustrating when he points his finger upwards to
the “high ups” in the Met.
