For some, this week has been the making of Sir Mark Rowley as commissioner of the Metropolitan police.
Faced with a prime minister and home secretary insisting tomorrow’s pro-Palestinian march must be banned, he has stood firm for the principle of the police’s operational independence from their political masters.
But at what cost has yet to be determined.
The commissioner said the intelligence about the scale of potential trouble fell short of the high threshold the law demands for a ban.
He took the decision knowing full well, as one source put it, that there were likely to be “messy images” of at least some trouble during the march.
If those images are seen as showing the Met to have lost control of the streets on Remembrance weekend, they could herald the end of Rowley’s tenure. A game of “I told you so” looms.
On Wednesday, the day he was summoned to see Rishi Sunak to explain himself, the commissioner was aware his job may be on the line.
By the end of the meeting, the prime minister’s hostile tune had changed and tensions were de-escalating, only for Suella Braverman to again ratchet up tensions with claims of police bias against different protest causes. But she later was forced to clarify the commissioner had her “full backing” after the two met on Friday afternoon, ahead of a “complex and challenging situation” this weekend.
“It’s been long days for the commissioner, he has not lost his rag,” said one source with knowledge of this week’s events.
Slim and bespectacled, Rowley looks more like an accountant than a street fighter.
Leading up to this week, there are three other times in his career he has risked it all, as supporters would see it, to stand up to those threatening the rule of law.
The first was when, as a young constable in Birmingham, he took on football hooligans, only to be attacked with such severity that he ended up in hospital.
The second was in 2014, after he had first joined the Met, when he faced a hostile crowd outside the Mark Duggan inquest, enduring shouts and spitting to deliver a statement as assistant commissioner after a jury found the police had lawfully shot and killed Duggan.
The third time was the huge risk he took in 2022, deciding to end his retirement and return to the Met as commissioner. He told one acquaintance that the disastrous state of Britain’s biggest force – “It offends me” – led him to take the gamble.
This week again, he risked everything.
Rowley is a grammar school boy from Birmingham who graduated in maths from the University of Cambridge.
He is intellectually self-confident, detractors say veering into arrogance, and has been seen as a high-flyer and innovator in policing, serving as chief constable of Surrey. He joined the Met in 2011 and ended up as head of counter-terrorism, a job with as much regular contact with politicians as any in policing.
In that role he saw the rise of Islamic State and an unprecedented level of threat. In 2017 he was in post when four fatal attacks hit the UK. At times of crisis, he developed a catchphrase for his staff: “Get me the commissioner, the home secretary and some chocolate please, but not necessarily in that order.”
And so he arrived at this difficult week, experienced in dealing with politicians and managing pressure, though not immune to it.
He was quicker than other police chiefs to accept politicians are part of the system and have to be primarily worked with, rather than resented.
His friend and deputy when Rowley led counter-terrorism was Neil Basu, who described his former boss as having a “core of steel”.
“This is a man who will not be bullied or cowed,” Basu said. “He fights for what he believes.”
Rowley’s stance is seen as defending what for officers is a sacred principle – that of operational independence – and he has strong support among his fellow chiefs. “It was an unprecedented assault,” said one senior source of Braverman’s comment piece in the Times.
Basu is critical of Braverman and others in government publicly threatening the police over the decision to follow the law. What played out this week, said Basu, was a constitutional crisis: “What she is doing is saying: ‘Do as I say, and if you don’t and it goes wrong, I will have your head’.
“If we only use the laws that politicians want us to use, that is a police state.”
Rowley has tried to clean up the Met, which is still in special measures, but far from being a slave to “woke” he refused to accept the key finding of the Louise Casey report into the force, that it was “institutionally” racist, misogynistic and homophobic, a term he has never liked.
Despite disagreeing with him on use of that term, Basu said:“It would be a disaster for policing if he went.”
One thing in Rowley’s favour is the dearth of candidates to replace him.
While he was retired, Rowley co-wrote a novel billed as a “compelling thriller about toxic politics and the radicalisation of young men”, the title of which may have foretold this week’s dramatic events: The Sleep of Reason.
