Women suffered at the depraved hands of Met Police serial rapist and sex offender David Carrick because opportunities to stop him were missed.
Official apologies and admissions of those failures are not enough.
Those paid to uphold the law must come up with a foolproof system to avoid recruiting villains, catch offenders in uniform and apply stiffer tests when investigating their own.
Because Carrick joins Wayne Couzens, the Met officer who kidnapped, raped and then murdered Sarah Everard as she walked home in London, as one of the worst criminals in the history of the force.
Trust in the police is vital and Carrick will inflict another dent in public confidence.
We know the vast majority of officers strive to do an important job to the best of their abilities. But that lost trust will be hard to win back without principled, clear and strong leadership at the very top.
Just pay up
Ministers must table an improved pay offer to avoid a teachers’ strike harming the education of kids in England and Wales who lost so many lessons to Covid.
The anger of those in the National Education Union is perhaps understandable when their living standards are being hammered.
The respected Institute for Fiscal studies calculates salaries of experienced and senior teachers fell 13% in real terms since 2010 while those in the middle scale are down 9-10%.
With many Scottish teachers already taking action and heads in Wales voting for walkouts, the wave of strikes is getting bigger, not smaller.
Poison pen
Shameless Boris Johnson will have pound signs in his eyes while penning his memoir.
Infamous for his lies and a Covid fine that damned him as the first PM to be found guilty of breaking the law, the Tory twister’s jottings will be found in the fiction section of bookshops.
