A friend who had retired from the Metropolitan Police introduced Malton to Linda La Plante in 1990, when the writer was in the process of creating Prime Suspect with a female character as the lead detective. The two women met at La Plante’s home in south-west London. “He showed me the script. I said “that’s great and it’s a great title”. One part that didn’t ring true was what it was really like for a woman in a senior role in the police force. Malton introduced La Plante to many of her colleagues, both male and female, and told her about her own grim experiences with the man who would become the infamous Sergeant Bill Otley in the drama. Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison, the character based on Malton, would run for seven series between 1991 and 2006, win several Bafta and Emmy awards and be shown to worldwide acclaim. “It’s the stuff of academic books, I’ve been invited to America to talk about it on PBS,” Malton said. “Everything was amazing.” How it all happened, she recounts in her memoir, The Real Prime Suspect, released last week, and explains further at her home in a Surrey village, far from the grimy pavements she once sped across to round up armed robbers. of the Flying Squad. Hers is a remarkable story. He grew up in Leicester, one of three children of a traveling newspaper man – who cried when told he was gay – and a troubled mother. She originally wanted to be a probation officer – and had a brief idea of becoming a nun – but life in the police beckoned. Even as a police cadet, he shone, unmasking a fishy character as a crook at the nursing home he was assigned to. Progress was rapid. As are the shocks. She got used to the ‘rocks’, but even that didn’t prepare her for her start at Leicester CID. “Two officers grabbed my arms while the third put his hands up my skirt, pulled down my trousers and stamped my bottom with the CID ink stamp – all while four or five other men from the team looked on” . Only the women who joined the group suffered this humiliation. Helen Mirren, as DCI Jane Tennison, with Ian Fitzgibbon, as DC Jones, in Prime Suspect. Photo: ITV/Shutterstock When she moved to the Met, she encountered much of the same behavior and her nickname was changed to “the tart”. This is how she was greeted when she was introduced to her new colleague, ‘Phil’, in the Flying Squad: “Why don’t you jump, mandarin, I don’t work with a woman.” Phil was portrayed in fictional form in Prime Suspect as Sgt Otley. Did Phil’s colleagues support him when he behaved like this? “One-on-one, they would sympathize with me,” he says, “but in the company it was tribal.” One of the book’s many chilling passages concerns her decision to report a colleague for corruption, which would have resulted in prosecution and jail time. When she entered the canteen after it was revealed that she was the officer who named him, her colleagues left to make their disapproval clear. Would this happen today? “You would be much more supportive now. But it still takes courage to report someone. I worry sometimes that officers are too afraid to rock the boat in case they get ostracized.” Earlier this year, the Met’s first female commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, whom Malton admires, resigned. A few months later, the Met was put into “special measures” following a series of scandals, some spanning many years. “When you put up these macho ads to attract people to the police, there’s inevitably going to be a number of people who join in to get the adrenaline going and get action oriented. Part of the police’s job is this kind of action, but most of it is not. “Somehow, some of these cultures have now gone underground in WhatsApp groups. Wayne Couzens [the officer jailed for life for murdering Sarah Everard] he was known as “the rapist”. Why did it have this reputation? It may just be from what he tells his colleagues, what people call “lots”. “When I joined, there was misogyny, racism, homophobia. Fast forward to 2022 and the commissioner loses her job based on the same thing – misogyny, racism and homophobia. There were seven commissioners at the time, and yet she’s the one who’s going,” notes Malton. “They are judged extremely harshly,” he says of the police today, whom he believes are unfairly criticized. “How effective were the police and crime commissioners? Who measures them? Most of them are Conservatives, so where is their true faith? To the public they represent or to their political party? I don’t know what they bring to the table. Why are they not held responsible for the chronically low detection rates, which are embarrassing – detection rates were 25 percent! “But I now feel that the police have lost touch with the public, mainly because half the police stations in the country have been sold off. Almost everything I worked on is gone.” Jackie Malton joined the police in 1970. Photo: Jackie Malton Of the politicians who have had criminal justice responsibilities, Malton is scathing: “Theresa May has certainly damaged the police with her negativity… Only Michael Gove and Rory Stewart stand out because they were interested in change.” On homophobia within the service, he believes attitudes have changed. He remembers being involved in the 1993 hunt for Colin Ireland, the serial killer of gay men, who gathered men at the Coleherne, the gay pub in Earl’s Court. “I said ‘use the Gay Police Association to put men undercover in Coleherne because it’s a world a straight officer might not understand.’ The officer I suggested it to said, “I wouldn’t do that, they’d just be interested in scoring.” I said “Excuse me? They’re police officers who happen to be gay.” It’s been a slow process to change attitudes, he says, noting that when the Black Police Association was founded, a spokesman for the Police Federation stated in all seriousness that there was a fear that white heterosexual police officers were “an endangered species”. In the hard-drinking, high-pressure world of the police, he soon found that large gins and tonics eased the strain – but took an increasingly heavy toll. “I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1992 and I’m going to one tomorrow afternoon. I was sick and tired of myself and I knew there was something better inside, but I couldn’t access it. I had every self-help book on my shelves, but I used gin and tonic to numb myself. I thought: I can’t live like this.” It pays tribute to A.A. that changed her life and 16 years ago she volunteered to work with addicts in prison, which she still does every week. “I’ve always been drawn to the dark side, why people do the things they do,” she says, sitting in the back garden of her Surrey Hills home. She’s the coordinator of the Neighborhood Watch – “once a detective, always a detective” – but that didn’t stop her from recently breaking in with thieves who sprayed her immaculate home with bleach to wipe out any traces of DNA. Burglars, like police officers, adapt to life’s challenges. “I live in beautiful Surrey, I have beautiful friends, but there is nothing so rich for me as being in prison and understanding the human mind,” he says as the lovable Jackapoo, Frank, wanders through the garden. “I was in a group in a prison yesterday and I had 27 men in one stable – murderers and robbers – and at one point I thought ‘how surreal is this?’ They were all so respectful, interesting, responsive and kind. I am an ex-policeman, 71 years old, and I am in recovery and they were talking about the difficulties they had as young people. Get a front row seat to the cinema with our weekly email packed with all the latest news and all the cinema action that matters Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “Some were addicted to crime, addicted to the buzz they got from crime. They would talk about how they would walk around town with their wives and children, and all the while they were making a reception for a crime. Just the thought would give them that incredible buzz. They couldn’t deal with the evil that followed the crime, so they would use drink or drugs to maintain the high.” Her time in prison also made her critical of the criminal justice system. “We’re very punitive as a society,” he says of the long prison sentences that are now routine. “You have to give people hope. And the parole system is so painfully slow – decisions take months to make.” Vicky McClure, Martin Compston and Adrian Dunbar in Line of Duty, a Malton favourite. Photo: World Productions/BBC One/PA A framed copy in her hallway of Bernard Levin’s essay quoting Shakespeare shows someone fascinated by words and language, so why has her memoir only appeared now? She had been approached many times in the past, “but only when I met Eleni [Mulholland, the former Guardian journalist who co-wrote her memoir] that I felt safe with my life in her hands and she had the ability to capture my voice.” La Plante’s creation had a major impact on police dramas by placing a female officer in the spotlight, and Malton has since been a consultant on The Bill…
