Again: all of the above stories are from the past seven days. But we can go back further. The week before, a Met police officer was given a two-year prison sentence for using his position to make sexual advances on two vulnerable teenage girls.

There were scandals in February, too. A report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct found that officers based at Charing Cross had made jokes about rape, killing black children and beating their wives. Also last month, at a hearing for gross misconduct, a Met police commander who wrote the force’s drug strategy – which set out to “raise awareness of the dangers of drug misuse” – was accused of taking cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms. And we haven’t even touched on the Met’s handling of the Downing Street parties row, which attracted much criticism: first for the Met’s initial reluctance to act at all, and then its decision to let Downing Street staff fill in questionnaires about the parties at their leisure, rather than face interrogation in person.

Any organisation would be, at the very least, embarrassed to be the subject of so much bad publicity in such a short space of time. But this organisation happens to be a police force: an organisation we expect to protect us. To uphold the law, not break it.

Of course we have thousands of excellent police officers in this country: brave, honest and hard-working. But, however unfairly, the Met’s scandals undermine their standing as well. A recent report, the Strategic Review of Policing, found that public confidence in the police is falling. Partly this is due to a perceived failure to tackle low-level crime, such as burglary (in England and Wales last year, just five per cent of burglary cases were solved). But it’s also because of the horror stories coming out of the Met. They’ve helped to tarnish the reputations of good police officers, too. This is the point about bad apples: they spoil the whole barrel.

In the circumstances, I suppose it’s little wonder that the most watched TV series of last year was Line of Duty: a drama all about police corruption. The BBC has yet to confirm whether there’ll be a seventh series. But perhaps there shouldn’t be. It would be hard for the show to outdo the endless police scandals we’re currently reading about in real life.

The way things are going, it will have to turn out that DI Fleming is a Colombian coke baron, DI Arnott is Lord Lucan, and Supt Hastings is the boss of the Mafia.