He’s our kind of cop

Decca Aitkenhead

Monday March 18, 2002

The Guardian

What are the qualities we would all look for in a senior police officer? The list could go on for ever, but fairly high up it would come determination to keep the public safe. Ingenuity and a willingness to find out what works would probably also feature near the top. A good policeman is seldom thought to be one who hopes that his uniform, combined with the size of his boots, will inspire sufficient respect to do his job for him.

A more imaginative police force isn’t merely the ambition of some liberal minority. The Sun’s white van man can usually be relied on to express the view that police should “live in the real world”, and nothing winds most people up more than an encounter with a pedantic police officer. The letter of the law, when applied to one’s own circumstances, suddenly becomes not so much a sacred principle as a nuisance; the virtues of discretion and common sense, on the other hand, are much admired on such occasions. By almost universal account, what we want are bright officers who can think for themselves. Few these days would disagree – just as few would call for a force that glaringly failed to reflect the population we pay it to police.

So what amazing good fortune for us, you would think, to have a man such as Commander Brian Paddick in the job. Here’s an officer so dedicated to his work, so engaged with the “real world”, that in his free time he offered his most experimental thoughts about policing and anarchy to a website. He introduced a pragmatic pilot scheme regarding cannabis possession, and risked his reputation to tell candid truths about the policing priorities of different drugs. He is openly gay.

And now, we learn, he put his own money where his mouth was. Finding himself in love with a cannabis smoker, Paddick didn’t arrest his boyfriend or kick him out to protect himself. He admits he did what every police officer I have ever known opts to do – which is, very sensibly, nothing. A triumph, then, of the sort of approach we admire.

Apparently not. “Gay supercop drugs and sex shame”, according to yesterday’s Sunday People. The Mail on Sunday called for his resignation. Both papers published a stream of other allegations, made by the painfully embittered ex-boyfriend, ranging from casual sex on the Gatwick Express, to having a puff himself. Paddick denies them all. Apart from the last, most would be irrelevant anyway – and yet the Mail may now be horribly right to think his position has become “untenable”. There is a credible risk that Paddick could lose his job – precisely for personifying the ideal police officer we all claim to want.

If Paddick goes, it will officially be for breaking the law by letting someone smoke cannabis in his home. That, in theory, is the media’s only objection. But the weekend’s headlines all started with the word “gay”, and his “extravagant promiscuity” – not to mention his taste for Clinique – enjoyed just as much attention as any criminal allegations. Like pragmatic policing, homosexuality as an idea may have become acceptable, and homophobia disgraceful as an idea . But what we say in public turns out not to be entirely reliable in real life.

Yesterday’s News of the World was brimming with letters congratulating Pop Idol Will Young – and, by extension, the News of the World – for coming out to the tabloid the previous week. Modern mainstream culture wouldn’t dream of holding it against the lovely young lad. And yet Frank Skinner and David Baddiel (who would consider themselves closer to Ben Elton than Bernard Manning) felt it was fine to snigger and crack strange, puerile jokes on their show last week.

Respectable comedians no longer wish to look homophobic. They couldn’t afford to, even if they thought that’s what they were, and they would be more likely to find the very suggestion absurd. And yet, Skinner wondered aloud whether being gay made Will a hypocrite, and would cause “a problem”. Like, would fans be all right about him singing “I love you girl”, when … well, obviously he didn’t?

If Will got a nasty surprise hearing that, it would be nothing to the shock Gavyn Davies received for stating an innocuous and self-evident opinion that is universally shared. That the BBC is dominated by the interests of the white, middle class and middle aged, etc, is perfectly obvious. Who would disagree? That it should serve all its licence payers is similarly unarguable. But when Gavyn Davies simply said as much, the statement was taken to expose him as a self-loathing, posturing hypocrite.

What all three men did was tell truths we claim to believe in. How curious that they, rather than we, should be the ones charged with hypocrisy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,669261,00.html