We’ll miss Cressida Dick when she’s gone

To all those – from Left and Right – joining in the clamour for Cressida Dick to resign as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a pertinent question hangs in the air: Who would you hire to replace her and what good do you think it would do?

If you are on the old-fashioned right of politics, you’d probably have in mind a figure in the mould of the no-nonsense former Commissioner Lord Stevens, a ‘copper’s copper’.

If you are on the liberal left, you are much more likely to demand a ‘Common Purpose’ clone, steeped in the fashionable jargon of the College of Policing and identifying structural racism and non-crime hate incidents as the central challenges of our age.

Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu talks the lingo pretty well, believing the disproportionate number of young black men in the criminal justice system is a sign of ‘racial bias built into the fabric of our institutions and society’.