Resigning as Metropolitan Police Commissioner as a result of the New of the World scandal, Paul Stephenson cited the recent Middleton/Windsor wedding as an example of outstanding policing. “You have seen the Met at its glorious and unobtrusive best on the occasion of the wedding” he said.
Prior to the wedding one of Mr. Stephenson’s senior officers told the news media with great emphasis that “joy” was the only response to the feudal spectacle that was acceptable to the capital’s police service. Subsequently Metropolitan Police and other police officers put a number of republican in preventative detention for the time of the wedding just in case anyone proved not to be filled with joy.
According to the Financial Times the police investigation of the News of the World focused “only on individuals whose security was both perceived to be of national interest and potentially to have been compromised by the interceptions”. In other words, only in the cases affecting the Windsor clan was the Metropolitan Police concerned. The thousands of others, good, hard working people most of them, were a waste of police time.
For the former commissioner good policing seems to consist of protecting the Windsors, though his officers who sold informtion about them to the news media saw things a bit differently. Mr. Stephenson is considered to be a “knight” in Britain’s feudal class system