This piece of good news was so deeply buried beneath the avalanche of bad days for the Family Murdoch that you may have missed it. But on Monday, the terrorist threat was officially downgraded from “severe” to “substantial”.
I say “good news”, but this needs qualification. It certainly seemed good news when I heard it on the car radio, and for the ensuing 0.27 seconds. However, on recalling the identity of Scotland Yard’s head of counter-terrorism, it took an act of will to suppress the instinct to point the car due north, stop only to fill the boot with canned food, head for the Highlands and hide out there like a survivalist lunatic until the radiation cleared from the skies to the south.
If the threat level was lowered on John Yates’s advice, after all, what hope but to flee? On his News International form, Mr Yates might have based his judgment on an interview with a Yemeni national, caught with sinister equipment at Piccadilly Circus, who assured him the iodine tablets were Smarties, and the lump of depleted uranium a filigree Siberian hamster having a snooze.
And Assistant Commissioner Yates was supposed to be the good guy… the clever, decent, 1950s-style copper who pursued Mr Tony Blair fearlessly over cash for honours. If this paragon of intelligence and integrity could place such trust in the words of Mr Murdoch’s executives that he felt no need to glance at the boxes of evidence, what on earth, one wondered, are the idiots like?
It fell to Mr Yates’s counter-terrorism predecessor to answer that one. If you haven’t seen Andy Hayman’s appearance before the Select Committee on Home Affairs on Wednesday, go to YouTube now. It will cheer you up no end. It will also terrify you to pieces.
At this unusually sombre moment in national life, Mr Hayman reduced that committee to astonished mirth. Its members were hardly in chuckle mode when he took his seat. Yet his performance, mingling breathtaking glibness with hilarious mock outrage, pierced the solemnity like a stiletto blade tipped with nitrous oxide. A hearse driver – not just any old hearse driver; the one known to his colleagues as Old Stone Face, with his beloved brother’s coffin in the back of the hearse – would have been begging for the side-stapler.
“I can’t believe you asked me that,” harrumphed Mr Hayman, leaning back and puffing out his cheeks in incredulity when asked if he had ever taken money while on the force. “What’s funny about that?” Nothing much, except that admitting to being taken to dinner by the suspects of his investigation, and later padding his pension with a lucrative column in the Times, hadn’t so much begged the question as effectively answered it.
There is nothing original about the thick English detective, although until now exposure to the archetype has been largely restricted to fictional cops such as Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes tales and Hercule Poirot’s Inspector Japp. But no novelist, or even police-bashing Leftie satirist, could have invented Mr Hayman, whom one MP restrainedly called “a dodgy geezer”. When committee chairman Keith Vaz compared him with Inspector Clouseau, all that stood between that arch New Labour chancer and a slander action from the Sûreté’s über-buffoon was parliamentary privilege.
Some have called for Mr Hayman to be given his own sitcom, and I see why. Yet his comic persona seems far too broad for a sophisticated audience reared on Ricky Gervais and Larry David. With the preposterous gurning and imbecile catchphrases – “I can’t believe you asked me that!”; someone print up the T-shirt – it would have been too unsubtle for the 1970s heyday of “Are you free?” and “Ooh, Betty, the cat’s done a whoopsie all over the evidence!” It might have been too daft to earn him a berth as a community support officer with the Keystone Kops.
Yet this man, who claimed that not having dinner with Murdoch executives would have been “more suspicious” than doing so, without offering insight into that logistical leap of faith, rose to the pinnacle of the Yard.
The least alarming aspect here is his collusion with News International. In his defence, having watched his former boss Sir John Stevens become one of Britain’s highest paid columnists on a Murdoch title, he was simply following convention. What mortifies is the sheer stupidity. This man, on this form, would have been wildly overpromoted as head of riot control in Camberwick Green. Yet he, like Mr Yates, was entrusted with protecting the public from al-Qaeda.
For too long, this country has tolerated abysmal detective work. Fiasco after fiasco – Colin Stagg, Barry George, the Paul Burrell trial, poor Jean Charles de Menezes, and others – has come and gone, and we closed our eyes to the pattern just as tightly as the fuzz screwed its shut at Wapping. Those eyes are open now.
If I was a school careers adviser, the one reason I wouldn’t tell the dimmest remedial student to join the Met and become an assistant commissioner is that, with the likes of Mr Hayman running the show, there must be better job security in crime. If ever you hear that the terrorist threat has been downgraded to negligible, don’t stop at the Highlands. Steal a boat, pack it with baked beans and bottled water, and keep rowing until you reach the Arctic Circle.
by Matthew Norman The Telegraph, 15th July 2011
