GRAHAM GRANT: Crooks are rubbing their hands in glee while Police Scotland top brass are fighting like ferrets in a sack...

By GRAHAM GRANT, SCOTTISH HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR Published: 17:54, 24 August 2026 | Updated: 17:55, 24 August 2026 When the upper ranks of policing are being compared to ‘Game of Thrones on steroids’, you know there’s a real problem. There have been so many twists and turns to the power struggles at the top of the single force that it’s hard to keep track of them. A decent summary would be that toxicity in the highest echelons of Police Scotland has reached boiling point. Infighting and power struggles abound, culminating in a showdown when a senior officer told Chief Constable Jo Farrell she had ‘lost the dressing room’. The recurring theme among insiders is that another top cop, Jane Connors, one of Ms Farrell’s deputies, is being squeezed out because she’s seen as a thorn in the side of the leadership. Ms Connors is now at the centre of a bullying probe although she’s been redeployed to work with the London-based National Police Chiefs’ Council on tackling migrant crime – while remaining on the Police Scotland payroll. She threatened to take her bosses to court to get her suspension lifted – and it was. Her lawyers are now preparing a judicial review against the ‘unlawful’ investigation, which began in December. The Tories say it’s a ‘Kafkaesque mess’, with Ms Connors said to be unaware of the detail of the claims against her. Chief Constable Jo Farrell was told she had ‘lost the dressing room’ At the same time, Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs is being taken to an employment tribunal by a senior female civilian worker who accuses him of sexual harassment. He’s also accused of telling a chief superintendent he wouldn’t be promoted because he was ‘too white, too male, too middle-aged’ – a complaint which wasn’t taken forward. The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents (ASPS) is now looking at legal action to force an investigation. Then there’s the row over a watchdog’s report which found that police chiefs are failing to reach ‘expected standards of professional behaviour’. It also revealed the force had failed to report all allegations of senior officer wrongdoing to the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), the civilian oversight body for policing. Ms Farrell stepped in at the last minute to delay its publication by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) – and it didn’t surface until after May’s Scottish election. It was delayed because Ms Farrell and the SPA said more time was needed to consider its ‘potential implications for proceedings that were ongoing’ – a reference to the Connors probe. In March, ASPS accused Ms Farrell of ‘undermining public confidence’ in policing by temporarily blocking the HMICS report. This was one of the issues raised by Assistant Chief Constable Wendy Middleton when she confronted Ms Farrell at a recent management meeting – which led to her being told she was ‘persona non grata’. Assistant Chief Constable Wendy Middleton put her head above the parapet Ms Farrell also snubbed ASPS president Rob Hay when he went to meet her to discuss the HMICS report – and was told this was a direct result of ASPS’s broadside against her in the Mail. It’s a tangled tale, and one that you may not hear much about at Holyrood when MSPs return from their long summer break, though Tory justice spokesman Stephen Kerr is asking uncomfortable questions. Justice Secretary Neil Gray told an ASPS conference in June that he was concerned that some senior officers ‘might be treated more favourably and that standards are not applied consistently’, in light of HMICS’s findings. Rightly, he said this could ‘undermine trust in leadership’ – possibly a warning shot for the Farrell regime. But since then, he’s gone quiet, preferring to focus on displays of sycophancy to John Swinney – defending him over his World Cup junket which cost taxpayers nearly £100,000. As for the SPA, you didn’t miss its members speaking out to demand answers – they’ve been asleep at the wheel, as usual. Imagine the board of a private firm was presented with a report saying the behaviour of senior staff fell short of expected standards. Shareholders would be up in arms and there would be a clear-out of the boardroom – but in policing, things work differently. Ms Middleton put her head above the parapet only to be told her feedback had earned her a one-way ticket to Siberian exile as far as the hierarchy were concerned. This saga has the ingredients of a Netflix drama but as it’s playing out, crooks are rubbing their hands in glee. The spectacle of policing in crisis is good for business – when police chiefs are fighting each other, they lose focus on fighting crime. For the rank-and-file, this scandal is likely to sound all too familiar, rekindling memories of former Chief Constable Phil Gormley, who quit back in 2018 amid a probe into a string of bullying allegations – which were shelved when he resigned. Ms Farrell has failed to impress in the top job, for which she rakes in an annual salary of more than £280,000. That’s an increase of £33,000 since she got the post three years ago – an inflation-busting hike. She also banked more than £134,000 of our money to help her buy a second home. You might recall that back in 2023, Ms Farrell commandeered an unmarked police car to be chauffeured by one of her underlings from Edinburgh to her family home in Northumberland during a spell of stormy weather. Meanwhile, thousands of supposedly ‘minor’ crimes have been effectively written off and violent offending has risen by 6 per cent in the past year. Reports of rape and attempted rape are at the highest level in 55 years, and concern is growing over lawlessness in the streets of our towns and cities, notably Glasgow. As former Labour minister Brian Wilson has said, since the SNP’s introduction of Police Scotland in 2013, there has been ‘no local accountability or democratic input’. The SPA isn’t up to the job of holding anyone to account and its gruelling public board meetings are too often back-patting sessions for senior officers – with difficult questions firmly out of bounds. The SNP set up Police Scotland as a cost-cutting exercise and subjected it to funding cuts so severe that some patrol cars were held together with duct tape. Ministers sat on the sidelines while the force was mired in never-ending crises – a tradition Mr Gray appears determined to continue. A key concern of critics when Police Scotland was launched was that too much power would be concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals, and boundaries between policing and politics would blur. Those fears were entirely justified but as usual the SNP didn’t listen to expert advice – and embarked on a rushed amalgamation of the eight territorial police forces into the Frankenstein’s monster which became Police Scotland. Criminals who are watching this farce unfold can’t believe their luck – while SNP politicians and the docile quangocrats who are supposed to keep policing in check have their heads buried in the sand. In the meantime, top cops are fighting like ferrets in a sack – while the rest of us are wondering when, if ever, normal service will resume.