What is the point of the Metropolitan Police?

As the year draws to a close, it’s worth reflecting on which of our national institutions came out of 2021 in the worst shape. There’s the Foreign Office of course, whose failure to anticipate or prepare for the fall of Kabul was so brutally exposed by its top mandarin’s testimony earlier this month. There’s the Church of England, whose war on parishes came close to whipping up an Anglican insurrection. And then there’s the Conservative party, which seems to have embraced the dirigisme of Pompidou with none of the shiny infrastructure to match.

But in a crowded field, the Metropolitan Police surely take the gold medal for the most incompetent and inept institution. On every count, the force seems to have gone backwards this year. It managed the rare feat of a hat-trick of very public scandals this year without a single resignation. There was the disgrace of the Sarah Everard vigil, when policemen dragged women away in handcuffs for mourning a girl murdered by a serving officer.