He shows how some reporters were thrown under the bus to save the executives and keep Rupert Murdoch from being too heavily censured. He has held senior roles at a number of national newspapers, including The Independent and the Sunday Times. The same week that I came upon it, a headline on The Economist’s cover was ‘London’s rotten police’. Couzens has the hall­marks of a person who has killed before – his pre-planning suggests as much, while his criminal history shows that his behaviour wasn’t a strange aberration. What Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times journalist, has managed to do is pull together the major events that have culminated in the latest and perhaps heaviest fall.

You can equally make the case that the Met has always stumbled dysfunctionally from one scandal to the next, and that morale among officers has always been at an all-time low.A quibble is that it’s a pity there’s not an index, and that sadly though understandably the sources are often identified only as “confidential document seen by author”. He charts the failings of the Leveson inquiry, and finds a way to explain the conduct of News of the World reporters.

Harper reveals an institution that is riddled with corruption, racism, sexism, officers scuppering each other’s work as they compete for promotions, and basic incompetence. While not wanting to reopen all that here, Harper does say that what Mackey did was sensible while resented by some as ‘us and them’.The backlash from public opinion was the final nudge needed for the Tories to sack their leader, yet the police’s investigation is shown to be seriously lacking. Harper quotes late on a story from an anonymous lord justice of appeal that a scammer at his door was impersonating police. The Met police has had an annus horribilis, from the jailing of its officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard, to scandals involving sexist and racist “banter”, to the conviction of two officers for posting photographs of the murdered sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and culminating in the controversial departure of Cressida Dick and the arrival last month of her replacement, Mark Rowley. Among those quoted for the book are the ‘frauditor’ Peter Tickner, and retired senior cops Roy Ramm, and Bob Quick, and QC and judge Sir Richard Henriques, author of the riveting memoir From Crime to Crime; men featured or quoted in Professional Security Magazine over the years. But in general the government is treated pretty gently for its major role in the current crisis and in the demoralisation of the Met.

He quotes Lucy Panton, the former crime editor of the News of the World, whose police sources were exposed to the Yard by her bosses and who said that she felt she had been “completely hung out to dry” by a company she had loyally served. Today, our everyday experiences leave us with no difficulty in believing that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the ranks. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. Spanning the three decades from the infamous Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard, Broken Yard charts the Met’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today. This is despite the failures of successive home secretaries, from Theresa May’s disastrous slashing of the numbers of officers by 20,000 – only now being very belatedly addressed – to Priti Patel’s treatment of the police as little more than handy photo opportunities.This exposé is linked to those that follow by a thread of corruption, incompetence, of internal politics and lack of resources. Throughout this fully updated edition, which includes an assessment of Mark Rowley’s first year as commissioner and the Met’s failure to adequately vet the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, Tom Harper makes use of intelligence files, witness statements and first-hand accounts to explain how London’s world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess – and how it might get itself out of it. We know many of these stories already, but having them laid out end to end joins the dots and creates an overall picture of despair.