Bernard Hogan-Howe did his best to appear calm on the Today show but it is clear he is increasingly rattled by the pressure he is under. The Met Police commissioner was on the front page of several newspapers this morning for all the wrong reasons. ‘Just say sorry’, screamed The Sun. The Daily Mail went with: ‘And still he won’t say sorry’.
Those hoping for an apology from the police over their handling of the investigation into Lord Bramall amid unfounded allegations of child abuse have been left waiting longer though. His interview with John Humphrys this morning was tetchy to say the least. Hogan-Howe refused to say sorry and he repeatedly took Humphrys to task over minor points which will do little to win him fans.
As well as telling his interviewer off for interrupting, he confronted Humphrys for using the apparently ‘pejorative’ word ‘trawl’ to describe the way police officers gathered evidence. Hogan-Howe said:
‘I’d put the word trawling in commas. You justify the word trawl. You started it, you used the word. The word trawl indicates we are going out looking for complaints. The word trawl is a pejorative word.’
It now seems clearer, too, if it wasn’t before, that Hogan Howe identifies the media as the aggressor in this. He referred to Humphrys as being a part of a ‘media’ in a way that did little to hide his disdain. Hogan-Howe also said he was not going to look into cases just because newspapers deemed them important. He said:
‘If I only have to look into the cases that are pertinent to the press, I don’t think that’s the way forward’
The difficult thing for Hogan-Howe is that many would say that the Met – and the police more generally – have, in some ways, been doing just that in pandering to the media by making a fanfare about cases involving high-profile suspects. In that sense, the police can’t have their cake and eat it.
But increasingly, the issue of Hogan-Howe apologising or not is not just about a five-letter word. Nor is it just about dealing with the media. Hogan-Howe may go another day without saying sorry over what happened to Lord Bramall. But he is missing the wider point that this is becoming an issue about the Met’s inability to hold its hands up and admit where it made mistakes. By appearing so defensive, the Met Police boss won’t have done himself any favours in convincing critics that he is in charge of an organisation willing to do that.
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