Piecing together evidence from original documents and artefacts, this book tells the story of Anne Boleyn's relationship with, and influence over her daughter Elizabeth. In so doing, it sheds light on two of the most famous and influential women in history. Ultimately, she quit. She had lasted five years. McDonald has now written a book about her experiences, No Comment: What I Wish I’d Known About Becoming a Detective, in which she lays bare the realities of life in the police force, and which the police force is unlikely to use as an advertising manual for potential new recruits. Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues, lovers and neighbours. Jess McDonald, who left the Metropolitan Police two years ago, opens up about the problems – and misconceptions – of an embattled force. I wrote what I saw,” McDonald says, “and, yes, it reveals an uncomfortable truth, but then the police are our public servants at the end of the day, and so we should know what goes on, shouldn’t we?”

Prince Harry sits down with Anderson Cooper from CBS' 60 Minutes 60 Minutes: Prince Harry InterviewIn the summer of 2017, McDonald was between jobs, having cycled through careers in management consultancy, advertising and tech sales. She was shadowing a barrister and considering going into law when she saw a female detective testify at a child abuse trial and realised that hers was a job capable of changing lives. To access eLibrary content for free all you need is a library card number. If you don’t have a library card, you can apply straight away: The Met Police's Direct Entry Detective scheme was aimed at turning people with no experience of the police into detectives. The woman reported him, and the husband was arrested. “We charged him, had him remanded, but he kept appealing, and kept winning. He’d go to court and say things like, ‘Oh, but I’m going to miss my sister’s wedding,’ and the judge would let him go.” Borrow The Rooster House → Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama

Jess McDonald was a true crime junkie and Line of Duty sofa sleuth with a strong sense of justice. Under a year later, thanks to a controversial new initiative, she was a detective in the London Metropolitan Police Service. As for the book’s other allegations about behaviour and culture in the force, it added that the commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, “has been unequivocal in his determination to raise standards and improve culture across the Met as outlined in our recent update on standards and in the turnaround plan”. Elizabeth I was less than three years old when her mother was executed. Given that she could have held precious few memories of Anne Boleyn, it is often assumed that her mother exerted little influence over her. But this is both inaccurate and misleading. Elizabeth knew that she had to be discreet about Anne, but there is compelling evidence that her mother exerted a profound influence on her character, beliefs and reign. Even during Henry's lifetime, Elizabeth dared to express her sympathy for her late mother by secretly wearing Anne's famous 'A' pendant when she sat for a painting with her father and siblings. In a statement, the Met said that after McDonald raised bullying concerns, she had been offered “substantial management guidance, advice and welfare support” and encouraged to come forward with more information; it insisted that it takes allegations of officer criminality, as in Mel’s case, “incredibly seriously”.These findings shook a nation whose trust in policing was already plummeting. The latest poll shows just 40 per cent of Britons have confidence in the police – down from 67 per cent last year, and 87 per cent in 1981. All the while, across the country antisocial behaviour is rising even as officer recruitment does, and more than nine in ten crimes in England and Wales now go unsolved. You could be the first person they’d spoken to about it and they’d honestly believe you were going to help them – and you’d really want to help,” she says. “So you’d put everything together and work really hard and take it to the CPS – and it was so hard to get anything prosecuted. After all that, you’d often have to say to someone who’d told you what was happening to them that you couldn’t do anything.” Finding the suspect was easy – if not the partner, it was generally someone the victim knew, with “stranger rapes” in dark alleyways so rare that they were dealt with by a separate unit. The hard part was charging them. Borrow Foreign Bodies → How Not to Be an Antique Dealer: Everything I've Learnt That Nobody Told Me, by Drew Pritchard

At one point in the book, she recounts living in shared police accommodation, and how one male officer filmed a female counterpart in the shower. He was reported, but not fired. The officer’s next job was to protect victims of sexual offences.

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She asked the officer conducting the interview how a jury would decide who to believe. “And the detective, who was relatively senior, said: ‘Oh no, crap rape, it’s not going anywhere – don’t worry about it.’ And I was like: but how is it not going anywhere? It’s got to go somewhere.” How could conflicting accounts simply be deemed to cancel each other out, she wondered, without trying to establish the truth? With only 1.3% of police-recorded rapes in England and Wales leading to prosecution in 2020-21, many women’s worst nightmares must have been written off as “crap rapes”. The moment she qualified, the regularity of her previous working life evaporated. “It’s all shiftwork, so you no longer have a Monday to Friday, and you don’t have weekends off. Instead, you have rest days. But if you’re working a particular case, you just see it through to completion. The work-life balance,” she notes, “wasn’t great.” People complain to the police all the time that they’re not doing enough [to secure a conviction], but what they have to understand is that our work was often frustrated by the next step in the criminal justice system. The Crown Prosecution Service isn’t really fit for purpose; they’re failing to keep people safe time and again. If the CPS doesn’t deal with it properly, then there’s only so much the police can do.” Borrow How Not to Be an Antique Dealer → No Comment: What I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Detective, by Jess McDonald A relationship ended, and now the bulk of her social circle was made up of fellow trainees. After graduating, she was posted to east London, and worked largely with domestic abuse cases. Almost 11 per cent of all crimes reported to the police concern domestic abuse but, McDonald says, these are often the hardest to get a conviction for.

I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was is an insight into the depths of her psyche, and a stark exploration of what trauma can do to someone. Reflecting on years of personal and professional experience, she opens up to readers about her struggles with mental health and different treatments over the years, hoping to provide reassurance and guidance to anyone confronting their own anticipated, or unanticipated, struggles with mental health. After a while, it just became intolerable. The job is already traumatic enough as it is, you know?” What would she say to a friend who was considering going into policing? She doesn’t hesitate: “I’d say go for it. But don’t suffer in silence.”As for the pitiful rape prosecution rate, her time working on sexual and domestic violence cases inside the Met’s community safety unit (CSU) convinced McDonald that the real culprit wasn’t police misogyny but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) criteria that set a high bar for prosecuting. “They want a realistic chance of conviction. But with these crimes against women – and they are predominantly crimes against women – you can’t have that,” she says, pointing out that intimate crimes rarely have witnesses. “I’m not saying they’re easy crimes to prosecute and then to convict. However, it’s not good enough to just be like: ‘Oh, it’s a grey area’ – a lot of these crimes are grey. It’s so very, very demoralising when you work in a unit where other women you work with say they wouldn’t report it if they were raped themselves.” I was gripped by this unflinching close-up account of life as a new Met detective. As a female outsider, McDonald offers a rare insight into the current state of the UK's biggest and most controversial police force - a world usually painfully resistant to scrutiny. No Comment is essential reading for anyone interested in the questions being asked of the Met today, and its passionate call for change could hardly be more timely Unlike the women she worked with, McDonald said she would still report a sexual offence to the police (“I’d write my statement myself”). But with two-year waits for rape trial dates, she conceded that “you don’t have meaningful access to justice”. She has learned from her time in the police to protect herself. The reality, so different from her favourite TV dramas, was a slog of poor resources, sadistic sergeants and failed victims. She was bullied by two bosses, who belittled her and singled her out: scheduling her first night shift on her birthday, meticulously listing her trivial mistakes (like failing to attend the Met’s Christmas carol concert), chastising her for requesting holiday, and bragging about writing “damning” appraisals to “destroy” her career. Nothing happened when she complained. There was a “culture of silence” around badly behaved officers, she told me. For a short period she was signed off with depression, and then had PTSD diagnosed as she left.