When monster rapists wear the badge, trust in the police is irretrievably broken - Peter Bleksley

My first thought was, ‘What am I going to be arrested for?’, because me and some of my mates did occasionally get up to acts of teenage stupidity at the weekends, none of which I remain remotely proud of.

Fortunately, Mum held loftier ambitions for me than a career of manual labour at Woolies, and unbeknown to her only son, she had reached out to our local Bobby in an effort to get him to persuade me to join the police.

I nervously accepted the officer’s invitation to sit next to him. His granite-like, chiselled features softened, as he went on to tell me with much affection what a great profession policing was.

A huge range of opportunities could be mine, he said. I could drive fast cars, carry a gun, ride a horse, and work with a dog. I could even become a detective, all the time working with teams where you looked out for one another, and got to lock up bad people.

He’d got my attention, and I was warming to the idea, but then he delivered the absolute deal-maker: there would be lots of opportunities to play sport.

My enthusiasm was now running rampant when, suddenly, he asked me what music I listened to. This threw me a bit, but there was a method to his line of questioning.

Having enquired about my favourite bands, he wanted to know whether I had any posters of them on my wall. I was a teenager - of course I did, so when he invited himself into my bedroom to see them, I wasn’t about to say no.

This shrewd and worldly-wise cop wasn’t particularly interested in my musical tastes, but he had engineered a way to have a nose around my most private space. And he certainly did that. He only gave a cursory glance at The Faces, The Rolling Stones and The Who, all of whom adorned my walls.

He lingered rather longer over my Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster, but all the while he kept me engaged in conversation, as he studied my bookshelf, my bedside cabinet, and my wardrobe. We returned to the lounge where Mum was sitting nervously.

I’d clearly passed this stage of the vetting and selection process, because he pulled an application form from his coat pocket, laid it on the table, and wished me luck.

In less than a couple of hours, this astute officer had engaged comprehensively with my Mum and had clearly established that I wasn’t an anarchy-supporting, rampant subversive.

A few weeks later, after my references had been spoken to, I faced a gruelling interview by a panel of old-school police bosses at Hendon. Not long after that, I was sworn in.

So much of the recruitment process back then was based on plain and simple common-sense principles, most of which we learnt this week, the Metropolitan Police abandoned between 2018 and 2023.

This rampant neglect of duty allowed monsters and deviants to join Britain’s biggest police service, and created traumatised victims of the most appalling crimes, as these beasts who should never have been allowed within a million miles of a warrant card, went on to indulge in their repugnant, despicable behaviour. Public trust naturally tanked, quite possibly never to be recovered.

And as we hear more of the usual hollow apologies and unconvincing promises as to the future, there is a deafening silence regarding the senior officers who made these catastrophic decisions and presided over these unforgivable derelictions of duty.

We should know who they are, but we don’t. They should be stripped of public office, but they won’t be. Senior police officers are frequently allowed to fail upwards.

They bang on about accountability, but talk is cheap, and it rarely seems to apply to them. And they wonder why the public doesn’t trust them. There are no so blind as those who cannot see.