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Before his retirement as Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in May 2007, Brian Paddick was known as Britain’s most controversial senior policeman. In the course of a thirty-year career he had seen pretty much everything that police work had to offer – from dodging petrol bombs during the Brixton riots to storming crack houses, from rooting out police corruption to policing major events such as the Notting Hill Carnival, Wimbledon and the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. He had also been at the heart of the Met’s greatest challenges, including the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
A champion for equality and race, Brian won tremendous popular support as the controversial Commander of Lambeth. Under his leadership, street robberies fell by 49%, an achievement yet to be repeated. His sudden and unjust removal led to a public campaign for his reinstatement, unparalleled in the history of the Police Service. Most recently he has clashed with the organisation over its disastrous handling of the events surrounding the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell in 2005: a clash that contributed to his decision to forge a new career.
Still only fifty years old, Brian Paddick now tells the extraordinary story of his life so far, how he managed to rise to the upper echelons of an organisation seemingly designed to keep people like him – as an openly gay man – either down or, even better, out. It’s a story of devastating setbacks and sudden leaps forward, of battles fought with the media and his commanding officers. It also provides a refreshingly critical, sometimes hilarious look at the Met, an institution where Brian found his innate honesty to be more of an impediment than his sexuality.
With an explosive inside account of what really happened at the most senior levels of New Scotland Yard in the immediate wake of the Stockwell shooting, as well as fresh insights into the Met’s response to 7/7, Line of Fire provides the missing link between police memoir, true crime and celebrity autobiography. Line of Fire shows the making of the man who is now in the race to become London’s Mayor. Whatever the outcome of that contest, Brian Paddick is going to be a feature of British public life for a long time to come, and this hugely compelling memoir explains for the first time what makes him tick.
book reviews
- The Guardian
“Paddick's fascinating book [is full of] lively, often racy candour. It is the sexually frankest autobiography by any senior officer.” - Financial Times
“I admired the book's candour… a succession of anecdotes that could have been lifted from the TV series Life on Mars” - Sunday Times
“this entertaining and revealing autobiography”
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