Now you see me

Congratulations are due to Chief Constable Simon Megicks of Cambridgeshire who, after very nearly 12 months in the role, has decided that the time has come to retire. He will step down on September 29 and, in a stroke of good fortune that nobody could possibly have anticipated, will be reappointed to precisely the same job a month later, on a new contract running until 2030.

In doing so, he will be demonstrating precisely the kind of continuity of leadership that the last HMICFRS inspection found rather lacking.

This is not, we are assured, a wheeze, a fiddle, or in any sense a trick of the light. It is the ‘Retire and Rejoin Scheme’, and it is entirely legitimate, and it does not cost the taxpayer a single penny, and if you say any of that in a slightly different tone of voice you will be accused of being cynical, which I am not, because I am too old and too tired, and also because I have seen this trick performed rather a lot lately.

Mr Megicks states he wants to “reassure people across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough” that none of this amounts to any disruption whatsoever. I am reassured. I am always reassured when someone tells me not to worry about something I hadn’t previously thought to worry about.

One does wonder whether, somewhere in a filing cabinet in the Home Office, there is a leaflet titled ‘How To Retire Without Actually Retiring’, available strictly to those on six figures.

Meanwhile, out on the front line, a constable who fancies a fortnight off to recover from being spat at, thumped, or sworn at by a man defending his human right to be aggressively drunk in a shopping precinct must apply for annual leave in the usual way, and pray it isn’t refused because of ‘resourcing pressures’. No Rejoin Scheme is on offer to him. He simply leaves, and does not come back, because 30 years of that sort of evening eventually persuades a man that his pension, whatever its shape, is better spent doing something else entirely.

Yours,

Stitch

stitchley@policeprofessional.com

@SOStitchley