But if you look at the advertisement for the job put out by the Home Office, you will see that it states baldly that ?applicants must be British citizens?. The Police Act of 1996, which lays down the role of the Commissioner, makes no such stipulation, but Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has decided to do so. No Brattons need apply.
Within Whitehall, this is seen as a clear snub by Mrs May to Mr Cameron, and a neat piece of bureaucratic manoeuvring. It is Mrs May, after all, who makes the appointment (after consultation with the Mayor of London), so there is not much the Prime Minister can do. As is often the case in British government, the establishment is trying to frustrate the wishes of Downing Street.
Having met Mr Bratton and heard him speak several times, I am biased in his favour. He articulates very clearly how crime-fighting works when you empower police in their precincts. He is good at mixing the big picture with the minutely local one. His record in turning round the policing of great cities is ? to use a simile normally applied to villains ? as long as your arm. Of course, one cannot be certain that he would be the best candidate for the Met job, but I know that he wants it, and I cannot see a good reason why his nationality should forbid him from applying. Some people object to the idea of someone with a foreign accent talking on television about British terrorist casualties ? an odd niggle when terrorism itself is global: more British people died in the Twin Towers than in any ground-based terror attack in Britain.
The Met job is even bigger than that of New York or LA. London is the capital. As a result, the Met Commissioner is in charge not only of policing a great city, but also of protecting indigenous and visiting leaders (hence the furore about the rioters who attacked the car carrying the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall), and of leading counter-terrorism. This last involves co-ordinating an organisation with centres in Yorkshire, Manchester and Birmingham and a capacity that has grown by a third since 2006. There is also the small matter of the Olympics.
Is there anyone in the world, much less in ACPO, who can really do this job? Can we be so confident of our indigenous chief constable talent that we can afford to reject out of hand Mr Cameron?s ideas for widening the pool? In less than three years, two Met commissioners have been forced to resign, something which never happened even once throughout the 20th century. It could be that the job should be reconfigured. It is certain, however it is shaped, that it needs the best possible candidate.
The police have a good case, of course, when they emphasise the need for professional expertise. However much politicians rail against red tape, in practice they impose ever stricter standards. Policing is not nowadays allowed to be intuitive. There are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and complicated programmes about how to deal with murder, firearms, child care or domestic violence. There is the importance of knowing the intricate human geography of London and the scarcely less intricate map of an organisation employing 55,000 people. Anyone coming from outside, either from a foreign police background, or an ex-general, intelligence officer, civil servant or businessman, would be at a heavy disadvantage.
It is true, too, that there are some good internal candidates, such as Bernard Hogan-Howe, who won a strong reputation as a crime-fighter in Merseyside. And it is true that the appointment of an outsider would wound senior police pride.
But there surely is a problem with what Mr Cameron calls ?the whole culture of policing?. There is the unquantifiable problem of the talent that does not apply in the first place. In a piece of class-war idiocy, the previous government stopped the graduate entry scheme. It is also impossible to join the police later in life, so many able people are excluded. This single entry system may produce an esprit de corps, but, seen from the outside, the police appear a rather inward-looking group of people, still overwhelmingly men, with a trade-union mentality. They obsessively resist listening to the priorities of the public they are supposed to serve. They use ?operational independence? ? undoubtedly a good thing in itself ? as a shield to resist the answerability, through elected police and crime commissioners, which the Government intends to introduce next year.
As a journalist, I often meet the leaders of various trades in the public eye ? politicians, civil servants, generals, bankers, captains of industry. The leaders of the police strike me as mostly honest, well-trained people. But they also seem half-submerged by their jobs and worse at explaining what they do than their equivalents in other fields. They are too frightened of the media ? hence, perhaps, the dangerous liaisons with the Murdoch empire ? and too narrow. Most of them are true professionals, but very few seem like true leaders.
Much of this is not the police?s fault. They have been bashed about by political correctness, bureaucracy and Home Office interference. But this makes it all the more important that they should be led by people who can effect transformation, and let the world know about it.
It would be a great pity if Whitehall timidity avoided this challenge. Theresa May should be pushed on this by Boris Johnson. Next year, the Mayor?s office for policing and crime comes into existence, and Johnson is standing for re-election. I can see him really changing London with the Old Bill (an unkind way of referring to Mr Bratton, who is 63 years old) at his side.
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