Terror camps in the Lake District

Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, occupies one of the two hottest seats in British policing today. Since it emerged that all four British suicide bombers of 7 July came from his patch, he has scarcely drawn breath. Cramphorn’s only relaxation in that fevered week came after his surgeon — who has been treating him for prostate cancer — called on the day of the police raids in Leeds and Dewsbury with the bad news that the tumour had spread to his spine.

The consultant dispatched Cramphorn straight to the MRI scanner. ‘I stuck on my earphones, lay back and listened to Vivaldi,’ he recalls with customary matter-of-factness. ‘But after days of worrying about whether there were other suicide bombers at the addresses that we were raiding who might blow themselves up like the Madrid bombers did when they were cornered, I certainly needed those moments of peace.’ The emergency radiotherapy treatments since have been successful.

Cramphorn has a habit of being on hand for big historical events — and for playing his own part in them. As the last deputy chief constable of the RUC, and then as acting chief constable of the new Police Service for Northern Ireland, he quietly let Special Branch off the leash to pursue the alleged republican spy ring in the Northern Ireland Office — the ‘Stormontgate’ affair that eventually led to the suspension of Ulster’s devolved executive in October 2002. It has not sat since.

That investigation was typical of the man. Most ambitious officers who want to head up a large mainland constabulary would have aborted the operation in the face of powerful forces arrayed against it: No. 10, the Northern Ireland Office and MI5. Few careers are made by slowing the ‘peace train’.

This was all the more remarkable considering that, superficially, Cramphorn is the very model of a modern chief constable.