Race card Ali, your time is up

This is the story of how a bent copper in the Met managed to keep his detractors at bay by playing the Institutional Race card repeatedly.

The only thing black about Commander Ali Dizaei is his hair dye. Yet this Iranian-born policeman, the most senior officer to be jailed for corruption in more than 30 years, was a president of the National Black Police Association. The NBPA was not the only organisation to have been made a fool of by this arch-manipulator of racial politics: the BBC had made his dishonest memoir its Radio 4 Book of the Week, and The Guardian was also a willing media partner in his campaign to become the country’s most powerful policeman.

It is difficult for any organisation to admit to an error of judgment, and the bigger that error, the harder it is. So perhaps it is not so surprising that the NBPA’s immediate reaction to Dizaei’s guilty verdict was to say that his conviction had “come as a surprise”. Meanwhile, this bent copper’s newspaper of choice seemed to have an exclusive post-trial interview, reporting that “Dizaei, 47, remained defiant and told The Guardian the case was ‘completely outrageous and a fit-up’. He said that he had been pursued by the authorities, who had a ‘vendetta’ against him”. Amazing, given that Dizaei had in fact been found guilty himself of fitting up an innocent man who had crossed him, that any newspaper could publish such comments without its pages turning red with embarrassment.

The point, however, is that Dizaei — author of a PhD thesis on “racial discrimination within the police” — wasn’t just a bent copper. He was a politician, brilliantly playing on the fashionable belief that racism is the defining characteristic of British society to advance his career — and his alone. Not everyone was taken in: David Michael, a founder of the original Black Police Association, said last week that Dizaei “subverted the movement for his own ends”. Detective Chief Inspector Michael may have found it easier to say that than some might: he would not fear being described as a racist for attacking Dizaei. After the 1999 Macpherson report’s devastating labelling of the Metropolitan police as “institutionally racist”, its senior ranks had developed an understandable pathological fear of further accusations of bigotry.

So, what difference does it make ?
Oh, what difference does it make ?
Oh, it makes none
But now you have gone
And your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight