The real lesson of this fiasco is that we need elected police chiefs

Perhaps now you’ll understand what we’ve been banging on about, we localists. For the better part of a decade, we’ve campaigned to place the police under elected sheriffs. Some of our chief constables, we contended, had cast off the cables that once attached them to public opinion. They were concentrating on speed cameras and hate crimes and community relations when the rest of us wanted them to concentrate on being unpleasant to scoundrels. The best way to align the police’s priorities with everyone else’s, we argued, was to place our constabularies under locally elected representatives.

You disagreed — you, Spectator readers in particular. Our ideas, you felt, were downright un-British. They might do for people in hot countries whose leaders wore sunglasses, but one of the glories of Britain’s constitution was the independence of its public servants. We heard the same objections over and over again, voiced by stiff-backed former army officers and stout-hearted Tory matrons.