A bizarre hiring procedure came to light during the recent ugly spat between the Metropolitan Police and London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan. It was the fact that Cressida Dick, who recently resigned as Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (better known as London’s Met Police), had not one boss but two. The Home Office and the Mayoral Office are dually responsible for the Met, meaning that Dick answered both to Home Secretary Priti Patel and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The problems associated with having multiple bosses  hardly need spelling out. Google “two bosses” and the top articles on the subject have titles like “the miserable two bosses problem” and “how to handle multiple bosses & not lose your sanity”.  So why does the UK’s most important police force, which covers national crime (details below) and the security of the Royal Family, have such an objectionable structure? Let’s start at the beginning.  The night watchmen go gently… No official police force existed until the 19th century; instead night watchmen and parish constables patrolled the streets. London’s population was around 1.5 million, its streets patrolled by a mere 450 constables and 4500 watchmen. In the 1820s, mounting crime levels and increasing political and industrial disorder pushed some to call for reform.  In response Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary and later prime minister, established the Metropolitan Police in1829. Hence his  reputation as “the father of modern policing” and one of Britain’s more affectionate terms for its policemen (and now women),  Bobbies.  (Peel was also one of the founders of the Conservative Party)  The establishment of a police force was a highly controversial move at the time, although it was not an entirely new idea. The UK’s first professional police was formed in 1800 in the City of Glasgow, formed; in 1814 following the Peace Preservation Act Peel himself played a role in establishing the first centrally organised force, in Ireland. Opponents of government-sanctioned police forces cited fears about a loss of citizens’ freedoms, and had nightmares about the creation of a “police state”. To convince his critics, Peel emphasised that the target would be “crime and not people”. He proposed an alternative view of freedom: “Liberty does not consist of having your house robbed by organised gangs of thieves or leaving the principal streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken women or vagabonds”. Peel was convincing; the Metropolitan Police Force was a success. 10 years later, it absorbed other law enforcement entities within London. In the 1850s, policing was rolled out nationally. The principles Peel set out are taught to this day; his most-quoted line being about accountability: “the police are the public and the public are the police”. Devolution and evolution After over a century and a half of being run by national government, it was New Labour’s devolution agenda that complicated the police governance structure. According to Nick Bowe, CEO of the think tank the Centre for London, “​​The process we have today is the product of two decades of tug of war between the Home Office and City Hall”.  1998’s Greater London devolution referendum led to the first directly-elected mayor in the UK, Ken Livingstone, taking up his position in 2000. The original proposition was that the Mayor would be solely responsible for the Met and for the appointment and dismissal of the Commissioner. But a prolonged  argument led to the fudge of dual accountability - in large part due to the Met’s national responsibilities, these being protection of public figures from the Royals to the leader of the opposition, and coordination of national counter-terror movements  For Bowe, the Met’s set-up “replicates many similar tales of how devolution and the desire to spin responsibilities away from central government come into conflict with the reluctance of Whitehall to release their grip on power”. In his view, sole accountability should be granted to the Mayor to make things simpler and make reform of the toxic culture that has permeated parts of the force more likely. To put the Met in context, there are 45 territorial police forces in the UK. None are perfect and a common charge is that police forces are often out of touch with each other and fail to work in sync. But direct accountability is essential in any organisation. In 2020, an inspection found that Greater Manchester Police had failed to record 80,000 crimes. Andy Burnham, the city region’s mayor, sacked the Chief Constable Ian Hopkins. The system has worked well in London previously. In 2008 Boris Johnson, while Mayor of London, forced the resignation of Ian Blair (now Lord Blair of Boughton) as Met Police commissioner. And – perhaps surprisingly - there has never been a disagreement over who to hire; when appointing the Commissioner in 2017, then Home Secretary Amber Rudd even involved Sadiq Khan in the interview process. As Bowe explains, “it is hardly in a...