The fact is that whether this book had come out the year before or next year, it would still have been timely, because the Met does seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. Tom has also been nominated as Specialist Journalist of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Crime and Legal Affairs Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards. Has that meant, as Harper suggests, the best officers and most effort goes into CT and leaves less for economic crime, and the drugs trade? The shock in reading journalist Tom Harper’s Broken Yard, a new critique of 30 years of Met policing, is in realising just how wide­spread and rotten it is. A former Met borough commander, Tony Nash, thinks that many more officers with experience in the CID should be in senior positions.

In the case of murderer Wayne Couzens, who killed Sarah Everard, Harper highlights how the police referred to their colleague as a “former” officer to deflect blame. Today, our everyday experiences leave us with no difficulty in believing that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the ranks.Whereas the likes of the Krays in the 1960s robbed banks, risky and visible, their equivalents now are doing cyber, and profiting from the drugs trade and trafficking. They range from Blue: Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces, a memoir by John Sutherland, to this year’s Tango Juliet Foxtrot (TJF): How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing? Harper has concentrated on 17 specific episodes, from the shameful bungling of investigations into the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan, to the symbiotic relationship between Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Scotland Yard, which emerged through the hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry. Consider the recent memoir by the first black Met Police man Norwell Roberts, and his experience of malice at some stations, and not others.

This was the time when corruption among detectives was so endemic that the commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, famously declared that the measure of a good force was that it “catches more crooks than it employs”.If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair? He also speaks to detectives who are willing to question why Couzens got away with suspect behaviour for so long – and they ask why the investigation into Couzens’ crimes has been shelved now he is behind bars. They include the cuts in the number police of officers – 20,000 in 10 years, and hundreds of detective posts currently unfilled. Harper explains how corruption in the CID was rife in the 1960s and 1970s – but how officers eventually got a handle on criminals in their ranks. He has held senior roles at a number of national newspapers, including The Independent and the Sunday Times.