A policeman’s lot is not a happy one. And that of Keith Bristow is more miserable than most, although he was trying to put a brave face on it. “We expected you to stay in post a little longer than 780 days,” said Keith Vaz, the home affairs committee chairman, to the director general of the National Crime Agency (NCA), the organisation set up in the last parliament by Theresa May to be the British FBI.
“It just felt like the right time for me to go,” replied Bristow. His contract didn’t expire for another year, but he was leaving in January. Try to think of it as parole. It had also apparently just felt like the right time to go for six other members of the 13-strong senior management team, and so many junior feds had wanted to jump ship that their numbers had had to be limited to a few hundred. “Could there possibly be a problem with morale at the NCA?” Vaz asked.
“It’s just a coincidence,” said Big Keith, beginning to show signs of being unamused by this line of inquiry. At select committees, “no comment” is not an acceptable answer. Vaz let that one go and moved on to recent comments from a judge that “systemic ignorance of procedures within the agency” had led to the collapse of two investigations at a cost to the taxpayer of millions of pounds.
“We’ve learned from that and moved on,” Big Keith insisted. And, by implication, Little Keith could also move on again. He did so. How many people were seeking compensation from the NCA? Big Keith couldn’t say. There were too many to count.
What Big Keith really wanted to say was that crime had changed and not for the better. Back in the day, a copper knew where he was with a couple of well-known villains fancying a tickle by holding up a sub-post office with a sawn-off. The Hatton Garden job had brought tears to his eyes. Now it was all cyber this and cyber that and all the fun had gone out of the job. You couldn’t feel someone’s collar with a computer. Hand to hand combat was a fing of the past. Now it was mouse to mouse.
Then it turned out you couldn’t do very much with the NCA’s computers as they all had a default setting of saying “no” to almost everything. The money laundering database was more used to sorting out old lags trousering a few gold ingots out of the country, rather than your modern fraudster.
“People are using internet banking,” Big Keith observed sadly. He didn’t quite understand what that meant – being a copper is a young man’s game – though he did reckon that was why the agency had managed to retrieve so few assets.
Worse was to follow. Some computers had not been connected to the internet, the IT system had been in meltdown for three days and the hacking group Anonymous had probably done more to shut down jihadi websites and Twitter accounts than the NCA. It was entirely possible that the Metropolitan police and the NCA had devoted thousands of hours hacking each others’ databases.
“I see you are now asking for the public’s help in tracking down a missing £50m,” said Little Keith. “Would it be fair to call this Neighbourhood Watch with Mr Bigs?”
Big Keith nodded vigorously. This was precisely what it was.
“It all sounds more like Keystone Cops,” said Little Keith.
“That’s a bit harsh,” Big Keith growled
“I don’t think so.”
“You’ll never take me alive.”
