In his resignation statement, Sir Paul Stephenson struggled to come to terms with the facts that have trapped him.
First, he attempted to deal with his relationship with Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World, who was arrested last week, provoking Scotland Yard to confess they had been paying him for his PR advice from October 2009 to September 2010.
Stephenson began with a claim which may well be correct: "I have heard suggestions we must have suspected the alleged involvement of Mr Wallis in phone hacking. Let me say unequivocally that I did not and had no reason to have done so."
But he went on to draw a conclusion that was not so sound, claiming "the contracting of Mr Wallis only became of relevance when his name became linked with the new investigation into phone hacking".
That seriously misstated the problem, which is that the Metropolitan Police chose to hire the former second-in-command of an organisation while that organisation was being publicly accused of criminal activity.
Furthermore, the Met paid Wallis to advise them on media strategy at a time when his former organisation was the subject of intense press scrutiny; and failed to inform their political masters of Wallis' role with them at a time when their handling of the investigation of his organisation was buzzing with political controversy.
Second, Stephenson attempted to explain how it was that he had failed to discover the truth about the hacking at the News of the World and about Scotland Yard's mishandling of the affair.
He was, he said, an outsider: "I do not occupy a position in the world of journalism; I had no knowledge of the extent of this disgraceful practice and the repugnant nature of the selection of victims that is now emerging; nor of its apparent reach into senior levels."
Sadly, the truth about the extent of the dreadful practice was available much closer to home. Three months before Scotland Yard hired Wallis, in July 2009, the Guardian was able to discover that there were "thousands" of victims of the News of the World's hacking, by speaking privately to one of Sir Paul's closest colleagues at Scotland Yard.
If he felt unable to ask his own people, he might have turned instead to the widely-reported statement by the director of public prosecutions, in the same month, that there had been so many potential offences that the prosecution had to limit the number of charges to prevent the case becoming "unmanageable".
Alternatively, he could have read the report of the culture, media and sport select committee, published in February 2010, which said the committee found it "inconceivable" the News of the World's former royal correspondent was the only journalist involved; and which found that Wallis' former close colleagues from the senior levels of the News of the World were suffering from "collective amnesia".
In the same way, Stephenson claimed, he knew nothing of the failure of his own organisation: "I had no reason to doubt the original investigation into phone hacking … I was unaware that there were any other documents in our possession of the nature that have now emerged."
All he had to do was ask his assistant commissioner, John Yates, who discovered that the mass of material seized from the News of the World's private investigator had never been fully searched; or he could have read the Guardian.
In February 2010, the Guardian was reporting: "Scotland Yard simply did not investigate the mass of paperwork, computer records and audio tapes which they had seized from Mulcaire and Goodman. A small sample of this evidence which has been seen by the Guardian shows that, among those who were targeted by Mulcaire, were the deputy prime minister, John Prescott; George Michael; Jade Goody; Kate Middleton; Princess Michael of Kent; and Iorworth Hoare, a rapist who won the lottery."
By April, the Guardian was publishing full-frontal attacks on the Met's original investigation: "Something very worrying has been going on at Scotland Yard. We now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the News of the World, they cut short their original inquiry; suppressed evidence; misled the public and the press; concealed information and broke the law."
In the background, the culture committee reinforced the point, complaining that the Met had been wrong not to investigate evidence which implicated two senior journalists at the paper: "These matters merited thorough police investigation … The Met police's reasons for not doing so seem to us to be inadequate."
At one point in his statement, Stephenson appeared to recognise that much of what he missed had been published along the way. "One can only wonder about the motives of those within the newspaper industry or beyond who now claim that they did know but kept quiet. Though mine and the Met's current severe discomfort is a consequence of those few who did speak out, I am grateful to them for doing so."
