The sleep of reason

British police chiefs have a reputation of being more comfortable parleying with activists than chasing villains. Their first among equals is undoubtedly Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Rowley took the job in 2022, after initially retiring as an assistant commissioner four years earlier. A Cincinnatus in blue, returning to service in London’s hour of need.

Despite his status as policing’s Centrist Dad, the Golders Green attack saw the Commissioner coming out swinging in support of his officers. Coppers are too often thrown under buses in such circumstances. Whether this rare display of cojones is indicative of a sea-change at New Scotland Yard remains to be seen, yet Rowley’s intervention doesn’t change the Met’s lacklustre performance, the force near-paralysed by internal investigations and reviews. One swallow does not a summer make. 

Rowley is, in many ways, a the apogee of modern police officers. What might his hinterland reveal? Intriguingly, Sir Mark offers us a clue. During his short retirement, in 2022, he co-authored a novel called “The Sleep of Reason.” This ploddingly dull police procedural, I suggest, offers a compelling window into 21st Century elite thinking. And it’s only 99p on Kindle, which is considerably cheaper than melatonin.

The Sleep of Reason is not a cri du coureur about the state of policing, Sir Mark declining to indulge any of the candour denied in office. Instead, he reveals himself a true believer in centrist orthodoxy. One imagines, at police staff college, Rowley underwent a process similar to the “Ludovico” reprogramming suffered by Alex the Droog in “A Clockwork Orange,” possibly involving overexposure to the works of Anthony Giddens, Will Hutton, Naomi Klein and Toni Morrison. Rowley’s attempts at even-handedness involves more triangulation than a Toblerone factory. Indeed, The Sleep of Reason makes an episode of “The Rest is Politics” feel like a month trapped in a lift with Nick Fuentes. The Sleep of Reason is an artefact of peak woke, three hundred pages of metaphorical knee-bending. The Rowley of then might be surprised by the Rowley of now, a man who sends Zack Polanski passive-aggressive letters. 

The Sleep of Reason’s characters offer a rolodex of DEI cliches. Its heroine is detective superintendent Sophie Gabriel, a no-nonsense high-flier. When not chasing terrorists, Sophie fearlessly challenges witnesses for using gendered language. Chippy, and rude, Sophie’s a girlboss cop in a man’s world – even if, in reality, women are statistically overrepresented in the top ranks of British policing. Attending a terrorist incident at a theme park, she reminds us the attraction is “the UK’s 4th most popular thanks to a healthy sprinkling of European regeneration cash.” Yes, Sophie’s #FBPE too. Her boss is a gay assistant commissioner whose partner is a vegan, left-wing, actor. The bad apple is a heteronormative, northern, middle-aged detective called Neville Skeffington. No, I’m not making this up.

Especially revealing are the parts of the story concerning politics and race, which confirm the nature of the ghost haunting the machine. Rowley’s plotting, dialogue and story beats are cringingly orthodox, full-fat Britpopper-meets-Boomer redux. Sophie’s boss worries about “the rise of a new, violent and organised extreme right.” And so a white nationalist goes on a stabbing spree against Muslims. He’s a member of the ‘National Resistance Front’, a Combat-18 style analogue. The NRF (motto: “We’re getting our country back, one dead foreigner at a time”) are depicted as part “Four Lions” and part Sven Hassel LARPers. One doesn’t have to be a parapolitical aficionado to know, by the early 2020s, the radical right bore little resemblance to Britain’s skinheaded thugs of yore. Perhaps Rowley found the Dark Enlightenment musings of Curtis Yarvin or Nick Land too tame. The Centrist bogeyman bingo card is almost complete, though: the NRF does boast an incel among its ranks. 

Post-Southport, with its allegations of two-tier policing, Rowley’s prose is revealing. A right-wing demonstration is described as one of “Union Jacks, beer cans, baseball caps, white middle-aged faces contorted in rage and the smell of urine…” Emily Thornberry, eat your heart out. Rowley’s views would be funny, were it not for the disproportionate attention nationalist headbangers receive in Prevent referrals. Perhaps his views are explained by his sources — the acknowledgements thank Hope Not Hate, an outfit taken far too seriously by dim-witted senior officers. On the other hand, Rowley’s Muslim characters’ motives are treated sympathetically, albeit grounded in critical-theory style analyses of racism and alienation. Tellingly, in one scene an Islamist terrorist rescues “a terrified little white boy in an England shirt.” In a race-swapping plot twist the most villainous terrorist is a white British convert. Rowley does indulge in a piece of rare stereotyping, though, by making the jihadi ginger-haired. 

The National Resistance Front, predictably, are manipulated by an operative from the People’s Party, a thinly-disguised Reform-style outfit who rule in coalition with the Tories. Their agenda seems relatively moderate by 2026 standards — on immigration they’re pretty much in the same political grid square as Shabana Mahmood. What a difference four years makes, eh? The story’s characteristically flat ending involves Wembley Stadium, drones and Sophie arresting her ginger nemesis. The fascists lick their wounds, the People’s Party’s involvement unrevealed. Tellingly, this “gritty, realistic” story doesn’t feature any Muslim antisemitism. Rowley opines, “What the hell was going on? Between the splurges of violence and anger, commentators from the left and right blaming… everyone but themselves.” Which is perhaps the most revealing comment. Why can’t we all just get along? 

Rowley, then, is an avatar of our clueless and incurious elites. He displays an almost Marie Antoinette level of complacency about the people he notionally serves. This naivety is an understandable weakness in politicians, but not so much chief police officers. And the truly depressing thing? If asked to write a story using Chat GPT, I’d wager most chief constables would, still, come up with something even more dismally progressive than The Sleep of Reason.