Whether she was unlucky or a poor leader will be a matter of opinion, but controversy seemed to dog Dame Cressida Dick before she was even considered for the top job with the Metropolitan Police in 2017.

       As deputy assistant commissioner in 2005, she oversaw the operation in which Jean Charles de Menezes was mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead, insisting her officers did nothing wrong. A jury later cleared her of blame.

       From 2014 to 2016, while Dame Cressida was an assistant commissioner, the Met ran Operation Midland, a ￡2m investigation into a Westminster paedophile ring, which turned out to be fake. Innocent men, including the late Lord Brittan and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, were subjected to intrusive scrutiny.

       Dame Cressida had been responsible for supervising the officer that found that Carl “Nick” Beech’s allegations were “credible and true”. She later admitted it had been a mistake to describe the claims as such while they were under investigation, but she had done nothing to correct him.

       Last year the official report into Operation Midland said the force had been more interested in covering up mistakes than learning from them.

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       Dame Cressida Dick

       (PA )

       In 2019 when working as commissioner, officers sought new legal powers against protesters after Extinction Rebellion demonstrators brought parts of London to a standstill, and were forced to deny custody suites had been overwhelmed by the mass arrests.

       Officers from every force in England and Wales were sent to London to help the Met Police handle the climate protests.

       But what was possibly the point of no return for Dame Cressida’s tenure came when last year it was revealed that a serving officer, Wayne Couzens, had kidnapped, raped and murdered 33-year-old Sarah Everard in south London.

       Amid calls for the commissioner to stand down, Lord Stevens, one of her predecessors, said she must be held accountable for an “appalling series of blunders” that allowed Couzens to serve as an officer. Dame Cressida said at the time she felt sickened and that Couzens had brought shame on the force.

       The Met also came under fire for how it handled a women’s vigil held in Ms Everard’s memory during coronavirus restrictions, with photos of protesters being held on the ground prompting disgust.

       They had stoked fury by trying to block the event from being held, threatening organisers with arrest and ￡10,000 fines, leading campaigners to launch a legal challenge, still unresolved. Then clumsy advice telling women in trouble to flag down a passing bus later had to be retracted.

       Last year, an inquiry into the killing of Daniel Morgan stated that the force was “institutionally corrupt”, for concealing or denying failings over the unsolved murder. Dame Cressida was personally identified as to blame. Private investigator Morgan was found brutally murdered with an axe in a London pub car park in 1987.

       Investigations into the deaths of serial killer Stephen Port’s four victims between June 2014 and September 2015 were bungled. In December, an inquest jury found that “fundamental failures” by the police were likely to have contributed to three of the men’s deaths at the hands of Port, who drugged them in Barking, east London.

       The force also came in for criticism of its management of crowds at the Euro 2020 football tournament last July, when thousands of ticketless fans were able to storm into Wembley stadium, rushing turnstiles and crossing security barriers.

       Some people were injured, and a review found there were a series of “near misses” among crowds.

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       The murder of two sisters in a park in Wembley, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, also brought controversy for the Met. Their mother, Mina Smallman, claimed police treated their disappearance and deaths less urgently than if they had been white.

       Two officers who were supposed to have guarded the murder scene took and shared photographs of the women. They were each later jailed for two years and nine months.

       The police watchdog is also reviewing the handling of the disappearance of Richard Okorogheye, a teenager found dead two weeks after his mother reported him missing. It will consider whether ethnicity played a role in the way his case was treated.

       Last year, serving officer Benjamin Hannam was convicted of being a former member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group, National Action, and committing fraud by concealing his allegiance when applying to join the force.

       He was exposed only because anti-fascists leaked data from an extremist website, The Independent revealed.

       Meanwhile, the number of teenagers murdered in London hit a record high – 30 - at the end of last year. Knife crime, it seemed, had spiralled out of control.

       But other scandals have kept coming right up to this month. A watchdog revealed that officers at Charing Cross Police Station were exchanging racist, misogynist and homophobic messages. Among other things, they joked about rape and hitting their wives and girlfriends.

       It prompted Dame Cressida to write to 43,000 officers and staff telling them the force’s reputation has been damaged by repeated “poor conduct and nasty and inappropriate behaviour” but it may have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, according to The Independent’s home affairs editor, Lizzie Dearden.

       The force also faced criticism over its apparent hesitation to launch an investigation into claims of law-breaking parties held at No 10 and the Cabinet Office during lockdown.

       And all the while, in the background, has been the undercover policing inquiry, looking at the conduct of undercover officers who formed “abusive and deceitful” relationships with women. The inquiry, set up in 2015, has heard that from the mid-1970s onwards, undercover officers who infiltrated political groups regularly formed sexual relationships with women. At least one officer had a child with the woman he was deceiving.