Never mind the bollocks, it’s Liz Truss

For stupid newspaper headlines, I don’t think you can beat today’s front page of the batshit crazy Daily Express:

‘Straight-talking’ Liz Truss says coppers must “up their game dramatically” and cut serious crime by 20%, if she becomes prime minister. That’s all there is to it. All that needs to happen to reduce serious crime is for a here today, gone tomorrow Poundshop Margaret Thatcher to tell police officers to prosecute more criminals and it will happen. Later this morning, I’d imagine, Betty’s opponent Brand Rishi will demand the same thing, or maybe increase the number to an extra 30% or even 50%. if only Priti Patel, a vision in pink fear and loathing on the same page, were running to be PM. She’d promise to abolish crime altogether.

Wait until Truss finds out which party has been running Britain for the last 12 years, cutting police numbers to the bone. She will be absolutely furious with herself given that for a substantial part of that 12 years, she’s been in the cabinet agreeing with and indeed voting for cuts to police numbers.

I am not entirely convinced that Truss understands a great deal about anything, never mind the art of policing. Perhaps she’s been watching too much telly, where officers carry out investigations in around 45 minutes once you’ve taken out the adverts. No need to collect intelligence and evidence, plan operations, obtain warrants, carry out long and complex interviews, bag up evidence, take statements and eventually prepare a case to send to the CPS. Oddly, you never see anything like that because otherwise a police series would last years and be extremely boring. And in the real world, a million miles away from lumpen halfwits like Truss, if you don’t do all this stuff you won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of obtaining a prosecution.

The very idea that coppers are somehow slacking and need to “raise their game” is utterly laughable and highly insulting at one and the same time. In a previous life, I worked closely with coppers arresting people and the process was inevitably thorough and time-consuming, not to mention extremely professional. Cuts to police numbers were already underway but the government would say, “We’re not cutting numbers from the frontline: we’re reducing people in back office.” This played well with idiots to whom it didn’t occur that if there were fewer staff in back office than frontline staff would need to be removed from the frontline to do the work no longer being carried out in back office. Yes, exactly: police officers were removed from frontline policing to push essential bits of paper around.

Liz Truss laying down the law don’t impress me much, as Shania Twain might have put it. And anyone with half a brain, maybe even some Express readers, won’t be impressed either.

Tomorrow, I suspect, Truss will be telling surgeons to raise their game and cure an extra 20% of cancer victims, for firefighters to put out an additional 20% of fires and for librarians to return an additional 20% of books to their shelves. This is the politics of percentages, the politics of campaigns, the politics of bollocks. And no one does bollocks better than Betty Truss, except maybe Brand Rishi.