Quintin Jardine's blog

Further to the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson, having read all of his statement I find much of it lacking in logic, and the rest riddled with self-praise and bull-shit. In its totality, I don’t believe a ******* word of it. The Home Secretary said it took her by surprise. If that’s so she can’t be very close to her colleague Boris, who revealed that he and the departing top cop had a discussion about his intention, before coming to the shared conclusion that it was probably  appropriate. In the aftermath the politicians were united in their praise of Sir Paul, declaring that the force has moved forward under his leadership. If progress means going from shooting an innocent electrician seven times in the head, as happened in his predecessor’s time, to simply assaulting a drunk newspaper seller who later died of a heart attack, then you can’t argue with that. Come on, T & B, if he was that good, you should have kept him on.

Sorry, you cannot step around one clear connection. Yesterday morning, Sir Paul was revealed to have stayed for free . . . with his wife . . . at a health resort, while recovering from an injury sustained during an operation to remove a pre-cancerous growth. The media made much of a connection between the resort and Neil ‘The Wolfman’ Wallis, the former NoW exec hired by the Met as a grand a day consultant, but to me that is quite irrelevant. Forget Wallis; forget the Commissioner’s acceptance of News International hospitality on 14 occasions. Sir Paul took a quite unnecessary five-week freebie, which he still asserts was entirely proper. Maybe so, but he resigned on the day the story broke.