This article is from The Guardian.
This article titled “Prince Charles pressed for Metropolitan police to be renamed” was written by Owen Bowcott, for The Guardian on Sunday 23rd January 2011 18.07 UTC
Prince Charles was behind an abortive scheme to rename the capital’s force the “Royal Metropolitan police”, according to newly released Home Office files.
The commissioner of the Met at the time, Sir David McNee, became so enamoured with the idea of an honorific title that he repeatedly lobbied Whitehall mandarins and the home secretary.
In an attempt to redirect royal zeal, officials suggested that one of the princes might become a police cadet instead.
The documents, released to the National Archives at Kew this month under the 30-year rule, date from the late 1970s when the police force was facing damaging allegations of widespread bribery and corruption.
The notion surfaced in October 1977 and McNee, made commissioner that year, called on Sir Robert Armstrong, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office. “When the commissioner came to see me this morning, he said the Prince of Wales had recently expressed to him the view that the royal family should do more to demonstrate support for the police,” Armstrong’s note of the meeting records.
“In this context the commissioner wondered what the Home Office would think of a proposal that the Metropolitan police should be given a royal prefix and should thus become the ‘Royal Metropolitan police’.”
It was royal jubilee year and Armstrong was initially non-committal but said “we might end up with a Royal Thames Valley constabulary, a Royal Norfolk constabulary and a Royal Northern constabulary”.
An official in the police department was instructed to review the request. The reply referred to “the Prince of Wales’ suggestion on which the commissioner was understandably keen” but concluded “to put it mildly, this is not something we could commend”.
The official cautioned that jealousies would be aroused between police forces, and it would compromise “an essential feature of the police in Great Britain that they are a people’s force and not a crown force”.
The existence of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the letter warned, was “not a happy precedent”. Perhaps, the official added, other options could be pursued such as a “Royal College of Police Studies” or “one of the royal princes becoming a police cadet”.
Despite such discouragement, McNee did not waver. The commissioner, “nothing if not tenacious”, as Armstrong commented, “hears but does not accept the main argument of principle that, by accepting the title ‘royal’, the Metropolitan police” might undermine “the high degree of public confidence it enjoys”.
The following summer Armstrong wrote to the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, and mentioned a conversation they had had about it “on the yacht” [presumably the royal yacht].
Armstrong repeated the arguments against renaming the force the “Royal Metropolitan police” and said: “I am canvassing the possibility that the Prince of Wales might give his patronage to the establishment of” a Police Foundation.
Moore, in a letter from Balmoral dated September 1978, replied that the Queen was glad the proposal “has been given such careful consideration and would not wish to dissent from the conclusion you have reached”.
Undeterred, McNee used the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government as an opportunity to renew his claim.
Armstrong, in the process of being promoted to cabinet secretary, expanded his objections in a vehement memo dated July 1979. McNee, he wrote, “has been encouraged by members of the royal family in pressing this suggestion: Prince Charles and others have expressed their admiration for the police, and the wish of the royal family to give it as much support as possible”.
He said the establishment of Operation Countryman – a wide-ranging investigation into police corruption – made it even more implausible. “No less than 64 officers of the Metropolitan Police … are under investigation on allegations of serious corruption,” Armstrong noted. Charges were about to be brought. “It would not be a very happy background to the acquisition of the title royal.”
Frustrated, McNee appealed directly to the then deputy prime minister and home secretary, Willie Whitelaw. The Met, he insisted in a three page letter, has had a “special responsibility” for the “monarch and royal family” since the coronation of William IV in 1831.
Since then they had policed “five further coronations, four state funerals and a score and more or royal weddings”. More than 150 officers were deployed on royal household protection duties, he pointed out. Adopting the title would “raise the morale of all officers”.
Whitelaw was not convinced. Prince Charles became patron of the Police Foundation that year. More than 400 officers lost their jobs as a result of Operation Countryman; only a handful were ever charged.
The police and the Crown
• “[The police] see themselves, and want others to see them, as deriving their authority and their acceptability to the public, not from the Crown but from the people whom they represent.”
Sir Robert Armstrong, permanent under-secretary, Home Office August 1978.
•”The duties of the Metropolitan Police to The Sovereign are unique, historic, substantial and extend througout the force. .. The award of the title Royal to the Metropolitan Police would be an honour done to the police service as a whole…”
Sir David McNee, Met Commissioner, October 1979.
•Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1926 General Strike, called for all county police forces to be designated ‘Royal’ in recognition of their service. In 1973, the London branch of the Superintendents’ Association petitioned for the Met to be renamed the ‘Royal Metropolitan Police’.
•The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was remodelled under the peace process in 2001 as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) – a title placing the force in a less partisan, constitutional position.
•The Treasury argued that the Royal Mint and the Royal Observatory deserved their honorary elevations because they had been founded under “active royal patronage”.
•The decision to endow the Radar Research Establishment at Malvern with the prefix ‘Royal’, following a visit by the Queen in 1957, was viewed as a “slippery” precedent. A suggestion that the Meteorological Office (now the Met Office) should become the ‘Royal Meteorological Office’ was rejected in 1961.
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