He explores Operation Midland, the bizarre investigation into the claims made by the fantasist “Nick” – later jailed under his real name of Carl Beech – of a VIP paedophile ring which were deemed at the time by a detective superintendent to be “credible and true”.

They range from Blue: Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces, a memoir by John Sutherland, to this year’s Tango Juliet Foxtrot (TJF): How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing? In fact, one of the most revealing contributions is that of Andrew Mitchell, the former minister involved in the former fandango, which crucially exacerbated the rift between the Conservative government and the police. The unsolved killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan – another high-profile case – is covered in lurid detail, and leads neatly into Harper’s consideration of the relationship between the police and his former employers, News International. The shock in reading journalist Tom Harper’s Broken Yard, a new critique of 30 years of Met policing, is in realising just how wide­spread and rotten it is.A fish may rot from its head, as author wondered in a concluding chapter, but you could be more forensic and ask whether the problem in the hierarchy is rather of a lack of grip from the top down to stations (and why does one station have a better occupational culture than another? One senior officer says the Met should now be reviewing every missing persons case in the UK, and comparing it to Couzens’ movements. Sir Richard Henriques, the retired high court judge who witheringly reviewed the failures of Operation Midland, is quoted as suggesting that there are “far too many ranks” in the Met, no fewer than five above the rank of chief superintendent.

With morale rock bottom, 12 years of swingeing cuts meaning they simply can’t do the job required – ask anyone who has been the victim of a burglary – the Met, once admired the world over, is shown to be both institutionally rotten from the top down, and lacking the basic tools to solve crimes. Harper quotes late on a story from an anonymous lord justice of appeal that a scammer at his door was impersonating police.While not wanting to reopen all that here, Harper does say that what Mackey did was sensible while resented by some as ‘us and them’. However, it never really went away: using the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent hopeless half-hearted investigation as a starting point, Harper takes us through 30 years of scandals that have seen the Met discredited, at war with its Whitehall paymasters (interestingly, the force that is described as once being full of Conservative voters now has a police officer saying none will ever vote Tory again) and not able to do its job. There is, then, more than one side to the ‘fall’; internal and external, the Met’s culture (which is being aired more thanks to social media, and the Met last year brought in Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour) and how it’s serving the public by preventing and investigating crime.

Harper’s explanation of the phone-hacking scandal offers more than the well-worn narrative about sleazy, immoral journalists paying off greedy cops. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. He notes the problems the Met now faces as a result of the enormous rise in cybercrime, unrecognised by the government until 2017, when the Office for National Statistics finally started logging online fraud and computer misuse, and then found that 5m offences had been reported in the previous 12 months. Whereas the likes of the Krays in the 1960s robbed banks, risky and visible, their equivalents now are doing cyber, and profiting from the drugs trade and trafficking. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence.He also quotes at length Jonathan Rees, the strange former partner of the murdered private eye Daniel Morgan, and shines a light on his extraordinary relationship with the Murdoch papers. And with this week’s news about David Carrick, a serving Met officer who has admitted sexual offences stretching back over a 20-year period, Scotland Yard face yet another crisis.

This is despite the failures of successive home secretaries, from Theresa May’s disastrous slashing of the numbers of officers by 20,000 – only now being very belatedly addressed – to Priti Patel’s treatment of the police as little more than handy photo opportunities.He quotes Lucy Panton, the former crime editor of the News of the World, whose police sources were exposed to the Yard by her bosses and who said that she felt she had been “completely hung out to dry” by a company she had loyally served. View image in fullscreen Helen Nkama, the mother of Chris Kaba, who was killed by firearms officers in south London, leads a protest in front of New Scotland Yard, September 2022. Harper examines key episodes from the Met’s recent history, with frank contributions from insiders, in a book that should be essential reading for the new commissioner. She was made to reveal her sources in the Met as Murdoch tried to shift blame from the managerial strata to the workers in newsrooms. The backlash from public opinion was the final nudge needed for the Tories to sack their leader, yet the police’s investigation is shown to be seriously lacking.