Never before has the Met seen constant stream of controversies writes STEPHEN WRIGHT

As someone who for more than a quarter of a century has been at the forefront of the Daily Mail’s coverage of major police scandals, I cannot recall such a rotten era at Scotland Yard. Failed by the Met: From left, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Nick Bramall, Alastair Morgan, Harvey Proctor, Michael McManus, Paul Gambaccini, and Lady Diana Brittan But there were other officers who had a more objective stance on the shortcomings of the Met under Dame Cressida, and her predecessor Bernard Hogan-Howe – who in the wake of the phone hacking scandal banned informal contact between detectives and journalists, making holding the force to account infinitely more challenging. Matters worsened still further in February last year when the widow of ex-home secretary Leon Brittan – falsely accused of being a child sex murderer by Beech – revealed in an explosive interview in the Mail that a ‘culture of cover-up and flick-away’ existed in the Met and that senior officers lacked a moral spine. Yet Dame Cressida and the Met were back in the news again by June last year, when she was quick to dismiss the key findings of an eight-year inquiry into the unsolved axe murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan, which criticised her personally and branded the Met ‘institutionally corrupt’ in the way it concealed or denied failings over his killing. By then, further scandals had sealed her fate, including the police-vetting row in the Sarah Everard case and widespread criticism of how the Met handled a vigil in the wake of her murder, the appalling failings by detectives in the case of gay serial killer Stephen Port and the damning report into the ‘toxic’ culture of racism and sexism at Charing Cross police station.