Police VIP Signal Group Leak!
They added me by mistake
Me? Dominic Adler? Invited into a VIP Police Signal group? What on earth were they thinking?
Last week, an unsolicited invitation dropped into my Signal inbox. It was from a group called ‘Top Secret VIP Police Chat.’ How, I wondered, did they get hold of my telephone number? For a moment I felt like Robert Redford in ‘All The President’s Men’ (mainly because I’m taller and better-looking than Dustin Hoffman). Had a disgruntled chief constable decided to tell all? Or was there something more sinister afoot? Did I know too much?
Then, using detective skills honed over 25 years of coppering (stop laughing at the back), two things occurred to me;
The police have my telephone number because I used to work for them, and;
It was the Police. The invitation was obviously a howling operational security error.
Nonetheless, for the sake of my readers, I clicked ‘accept.’ Then, for the first time in my entire life, I said nothing. Here are extracts from this explosive chat, revealing the innermost thoughts of Britain’s law enforcement establishment.
The Protagonists:
YC (Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary)
NPCC (The National Police Chiefs Council)
HO (The Home Office)
COP (The College of Policing AKA ‘Hogwarts’)
DT (Deep Throat, the group’s high-level mole inside the Police Federation)
NCA (The National Crime Agency)
Please note, I’ve corrected spelling and syntax. A bunch of nervy, over-caffeinated coppers are gonna make typos. As do senior civil servants, despite their 2:1s from Russell Group universities. Plus, civil servants work from home in their pyjamas and are probably hungover.
I’ve omitted the group’s copious use of emojis, especially the unicorn-dancing-on-a-rainbow the COP prefers as an avatar. Although, quite sweetly, Yvette Cooper uses an image of her husband (former Labour hardman Ed Balls), as hers. I can exclusively reveal Ed’s wearing this outfit from Strictly Come Dancing:
Eat your heart out, Bob Woodward: this is Yvette Cooper’s top secret Signal avatar. Follow me for more deep state political scoops.
Without any further ado, and with apologies to Jeffrey Goldberg, here’s the transcript:
YC: Right, I’ve called this chat because No. 10 is very disappointed with you all. As Sir Keir says, we won’t tolerate you ‘soaking in the tepid bath of managed decline’ any longer.
NPCC: Yes Home Secretary. We were just saying the same thing ourselves, Home Secretary. Weren’t we, COP?
COP: You’re a wizard now, Harry!
YC: Shush, COP. Right, first of all, some housekeeping. I need a spokesperson who’ll go on telly and agree with everything I say. Someone credible. So, are there any NPCC-ranking officers here who AREN’T being investigated for workplace shagging?
NPCC: We don’t use that phrase, Home Secretary.
YC: What do you use, then?
NPCC: Officers below the rank of assistant chief constable can be, quite properly, disciplined for ‘workplace shagging.’ Officers of ACC rank and above have ‘temporary lapses of judgement upon which we reflect’, before being reinstated.
COP: At Hufflepuff, we’ve established a working group on workplace shagging. Officeromancius!
YC: Shut up. So, do we have any NPCC officers who aren’t being looked at for ‘temporary lapses of judgement?’
NPCC: The person we had in mind was suspended for bullying.
HO: LOL.
COP: Expelliarmus!
YC: Let’s move on. Next on the agenda is police numbers.
NPCC: LOL.
YC: Stop it. We need to spin 250 new student constables, a dozen specials and three PCSOs into an army of mean, lean, street-fighting robocops. This is what my Spad says. And he worked on ‘Police Now’ for almost six months.
HO: We have a file on all of your Spads.
YC: That's not funny.
MI5: It’s true, though.
YC: Who invited MI5 into this group?
MI5: GCHQ let us in. Hey, it’s not like you’re an encryption enthusiast. Just pretend we’re not here.
NCA: We’re here. Tee-hee. We should have kept quiet, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We’re spies too. And secret policemen. And, er, taxmen.
COP: Stop using gendered language.
NCA: Soz.
YC: MI5? Did I sign an interception warrant?
MI5: LOL.
COP: NCA, shouldn’t you be in the Pronoun Working Group chat?
NPCC: (Angry face emoji) With regards to police numbers, Home Secretary?
YC: Yes?
NPCC: We’ve formulated a strategy. We’re giving all police dogs, lollipop ladies, nightclub bouncers and local authority traffic wardens warrant cards and full powers of arrest. We now have fifty thousand extra officers. The biggest overhead is veterinary insurance, but we can put that on our credit card.
YC: I foresee teething problems, but I like the direction of travel.
HO: We can finesse it. If it works, we can say it was our idea all along.
COP: You’re all wizards now!
NCA: Woof!
At this point, the chat descends into bickering about the efficacy of issuing police dogs SIG MCX carbines to backfill the shortage of armed policing volunteers.
YC: Right, enough! No, I won’t have you giving police dogs sniper rifles. The IOPC won’t like it. Besides, the public love Alsatians and I won’t have the CPS charging any with murder. Now, I want to talk about a conversation I had yesterday with Morgan McSweeney.
HO: FFS, not him again.
YC: Morgan’s full of good ideas. He really is. The PM has complete faith in his near-supernatural understanding of the British people. Morgan intuits the feelings of the They / Them on the Clapham Omnibus.
MI5: McSweeney? Hmmm. We’ve got a file on him.
NCA: Can we start one too? Can we? Please?
MI5: No.
YC: Morgan’s told Keir there’s been something called a ‘vibe-shift’ because of unfortunate events across the Atlantic. Now, if the PM hadn’t told me himself, I wouldn’t have believed it, but… (significant pause).
NPCC: Are you AFK, Home Secretary?
YC: No. I was having a panic attack. Apparently, Morgan says the general public aren’t entirely onboard with our progressive agenda. What the forces of reaction and other flag-shaggers call ‘Woke’ (which doesn’t exist, obvs).
WITH A SAD FACE EMOJI, NCA LEAVES THE CHAT.
COP: THE PUBLIC ARE WRONG. WE ARE PREPARED TO DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST THE DARK ARTS! THE DEATHEATERS ARE HERE!
HO: No good can come of this, Home Secretary. Although we can negotiate, on condition we only have to pop into Marsham Street bi-monthly. And get an uplift in our pyjama allowance.
NPCC: We’re listening, Home Secretary. Although we’re obviously concerned. Will this ‘vibe-shift’ impact on chief officer numbers?
YC: No. I will be establishing a joint Home Office and UK Police task force. It requires a dozen officers of at least assistant chief constable rank. It will be known as the ‘Office of Vibe-Shift Hate Monitoring’, allowing us to clamp down on disagreeable internet discourse. Morgan’s very keen on that.
HO: Hmmm.
NPCC: Excellent news, Home Secretary. Did we mention how much we approve of your brilliant performance as Home Secretary?
DT: What about some stop and search instead? Or arresting burglars and robbers?
NPCC: Shut up, or we’ll tell the Federation you’re working for us.
DT: I was only saying.
NPCC: Then don’t. You’ve spent too long around the plebs.
MI5: DT, we’ll talk later.
COP: So that means we’re keeping Non-Crime Hate Incidents?
YC: Absolutely. We’ll just have to call them something else.
COP: Camouflagismus!
The College of Policing has special powers against the general public, who they think all look like this. They call these ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’, which they invented all on their own.
The chat ended on an interesting note:
YC: Any other business?
NPCC: Can we confirm the Metropolitan Police aren’t here today?
YC: No.
HO: Absolutely not. Last we saw of them, they were hanging around outside Downing Street looking suspicious.
NCA: The Commissioner looks like a ‘Thunderbirds’ puppet. Tee-hee.
NPCC: Quite. In any case, the Chief Constable of Loamshire County Constabulary would like to reiterate her displeasure at having to provide assistance policing the latest demonstration in London.
YC: Which one?
NPCC: ‘Non-binary, non-chlorinated chicken advocates for a carbon-free Palestine.’
YC: Ah, yes. That one. My Spad went on their last demo.
MI5. We know.
NPCC: Loamshire says the burden’s unreasonable. Frankly, most of us hate having to bail out the freeloading Met again.
NCA RETURNS TO CHAT: We agree. We hate the Met too. They smell. Tee-hee.
YC: How many officers did Loamshire provide?
NPCC: Let me check our notes. Ah, here it is. Yes, Loamshire provided six constables and a sergeant. It’s totally unacceptable. It meant the Tytherington Lacey county show had to be policed by two specials. The prize marrow was stolen.
NCA: Shocking. Met. Freeloading bastards. It’s PATHETIC.
HO: LOL.
YC: I’ll look into it. Now, let’s talk about hurty words again, shall we?
COP: Censoriamus!
Very good ! This takes me back to a time when Private Eye was funny, and when we used to wait for the ladies to get out of the lift first.
Both my daughter in laws are civil servants with quality degrees - I love them both, but you are frighteningly close to the truth.
Having shared the post, I quote:
“One for three”
“I am dressed and in the office”
“I have a 2:1 from an RG uni”
“I am slightly hungover”