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”.

Instead, she blamed a “misogynistic criminal justice system” – specifically, the Crown Prosecution Service’s charging standards. Time and again, she would complete an investigation only to be told by a CPS lawyer on the other end of the phone that there was “no realistic prospect of conviction”. The first time Detective Constable Jess McDonald interviewed a suspect who declined to answer questions, she was a little thrown. “I’d seen Line of Duty, of course,” she says, “and so I knew that ‘no comment’ could happen, but when it happened to me… oof!” She laughs, sighs, and blows out her cheeks. “It was awful!” More than twenty years on, Ronnie is still obsessed with delivering his peak performance, but success has now taken on a new meaning for the world champion. Framed around twelve lessons Ronnie has learned from his extraordinary career, with this book he takes us beyond the success and record-breaking achievements to share the reality - and brutality - of what it takes to rise to the very top, whatever your field. 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.”

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.” After a while, it just became intolerable. The job is already traumatic enough as it is, you know?”

She was thrown in at the deep end after just five months’ classroom training, plus a probationary stint at Bethnal Green police station. In the book, she writes that, by the end of the job, she felt like one of the abuse victims she interviewed: one whose partner “beats me up but needs me, and I stay for the tiny glimmers of hope that I will make a difference”. All but four of her class of 15 direct entrants have left the force, she writes. (The Met says it has since made changes to the programme.) She doesn’t know why she was targeted. “It could be because I’m female; it could be because I’d had an issue with my mental health; it could be because I was coming in from this scheme, so I was like an outsider.” As with racism and sexism, she says, bullying is hard to prove, because it is cumulative: “It’s like a thousand tiny things. You can almost explain away every single incident [in isolation].” But bullying is an abuse of power that should be a red flag in policing, she says. She wants an anonymous reporting system to be introduced to allow Met officers to raise concerns about colleagues. 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. Initially, the suspect had been chatty with her, even friendly. “But then I switched the tape on, and started asking questions, and he just said, ‘No comment’.” It is a requirement of detectives, when interrogating someone, to put all questions to them irrespective of whether the suspect is prepared to answer. “I asked the next question – ‘No comment.’ And then the next – ‘No comment.’ And so on. It was just very, very awkward,” she says. 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.The job there, she says, felt like fighting a raging fire with a water pistol. “What I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis, what I was personally involved with and the people around me were involved with, is more trauma than the average person would see in maybe two years,” she says. “It’s very, very high volume and very, very high risk.” She would juggle 20 cases at a time, overseeing each from arrest to court. A short secondment, to a murder investigation team, left her wondering why they seemingly enjoyed unlimited resources once it was too late to save the victim, while her domestic violence team – capable of preventing murders – was run ragged. Everyone knows who the dodgy characters are, but no one can take it anywhere, because that’s committing career suicide McDonald says she didn’t experience sexual harassment in the Met, but she knows women who did. Her friend Mel was living in police accommodation when she caught a senior officer using his mobile phone to spy on her in the shower of their shared bathroom. Fortunately, another officer intervened and the culprit was arrested, but by the time his case came to court, Mel had quit the force. “She’s said to me since, would she have reported it if it was just her and him? Probably not, because he’s more senior,” says McDonald. Looking for something new to read? Browse our recommendations. Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History, by Tracy Borman Probably the most important book on the state of British policing you'll ever read' Graham Bartlett