She might be wrong, because the cops have been wrong before, but here's what Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said on Monday at the Leveson Inquiry: that there is a "network of corrupted officials" spanning not just the police but "a wide range of public officials" including military, health, government, prison and others".
My ears pricked up at the words "and others" because it's one of those police-speak terms that could just mean "everybody else" or it could be a codeword for even more sensitive categories, like "the Royal household" or "the intelligence services". We'll have to wait and see: "government" itself is a tantalising word, suggesting as it does not just politicians but, perhaps, civil servants. But, like I say, she could be wrong.
The breeze block homes that cling to the sides of the cliffs above Piraeus harbour are painted typical Greek colours: cream and pink. The bare twigs poking out of hanging baskets and trellises stand ready to sprout, as soon as some warmth arrives.
At the clinic, on the corner, people hang around the doorway. Some have sunken cheeks. Others emerge carrying that international brand identifier of poverty - the multicoloured plastic sack - filled with old clothes and basic food.
Mention the word "agency" right now in the government offices of Europe and you'll get a frosty response. Ratings agency S&P;'s downgrade of almost everybody and everything (and they're not done yet with banks and insurance funds) annoyed those trying to sort out Europe's crisis.
But "agency" is the word uppermost in my mind now for a different reason. Rarely in economics do you find so much dependent on the actions and decisions of a few human beings. In its philosophical sense, "agency" is the key to understanding the present situation, which I will summarise as follows.
In a few weeks time, if Ron Paul gets swept aside by the GOP's machine, it may seem like just an interesting historical footnote that a man came within 4,000 votes of winning a Republican primary who is in favour of abolishing America's central bank. But probably it won't.
Right now, on the other side of the world, Hungary's government is staging a standoff with the European Union about the constitutional role of its central bank. And conservatives everywhere are relooking at the role of central banks as they morph from lenders of last resort to effectively underwriting - some say controlling - fiscal policy.
In a normal year predicting economics is like predicting the outcome of a card game: there are too many variables and the only certainty being that the suckers will lose and the stealthily self-interested will win.
In 2012 however, the shape of the crisis is heavily predetermined: there are a series of crucial stages the eurocrisis has to go through and the way they're resolved will affect everything else.
We had been kidding ourselves. It always felt, when you covered a Brussels summit, that Britain was there on sufferance, but the rules said otherwise: technically we were and are an equal member of a 27-nation union whose oft-explained "three pillars" of governance were applied for the common good.
Now, as is clear from Thursday night's summit statement, these common institutions are to oversee a selective "fiscal compact".
Yesterday will be seen as a landmark in British economic history, and in British politics. It will relegate George Osborne's emergency budget of June 2010 to a footnote and elevate Robert Chote's happy-go-lucky assessment of our economic prospects in November 2010 to the status of a case study in predictive failure.
Because yesterday's Autumn Statement will set the political tone of the decade: it will tie the hands of future governments; and it has already brought a philosophical debate on the British right to an abrupt end.
Here's my snap assessment of the Autumn Statement. First the big analytical takeaways:
There is a fair bit of tentative dirigisme in there: a national infrastructure plan; transport links upgraded with macro-economic design; exemption from carbon targets for crucial industries; 100% capex tax exemption in the north of England.
It now looks like Chancellor George Osborne's growth strategy will have to be executed in a global environment of falling growth, more financial crisis and the breakup of old trans-national institutions.
That is not necessarily a disaster, as I explore below. But it changes the game.
I've just had, as far as my French can comprehend, a verbal run-in with the President of the République Française. Nicolas Sarkozy came on stage with a face like thunder for reasons I will explain below. He took two questions from the French and Chinese press, and then me.
I asked: "It's evident that you and Mme Merkel, the two most powerful governments in Europe, are trying to change the governments of Italy and Greece. How is that just? And once it's started, where does it stop?"
Mark the date: 3 November 2011. In Oakland, California, protesters - including workers - have blocked the operation of a major US port; in New York, one of the world's top stockbrokers is bust; in Europe the Greek government is on the brink of collapse, the Italian government in disarray and speculators are short-selling French sovereign debt in the expectation of a domino effect.
In Cannes, amid torrential rain, many of the leaders have adopted the Gallic shrug: what can you do? They had come to work on the fine points of a tactical adjustment to the crumbling world order - but instead, as one markets contact put it to me - all the stories on the news are merging into one big story.
Cannes, France: I can sense very clearly here at Cannes that this is the moment "the masses" start shaping the policy response to the global financial crisis.
Why? Because everybody I speak to, interview or discuss background with keeps dropping the words "Occupy Wall Street" into the conversation. In fact if #OWS were a global brand, like the designer apparel shops that line the Rue d'Antibes here, it would have a profile to die for among the super-elite.
The Greek referendum call is, while it lasts, effectively a plebiscite on euro membership.
I say "while it lasts" because the opposition is mobilising a parliamentary manoeuvre to bring down the government, which may succeed - returning Europe to its status quo of containable trauma.
In search of a metaphor in this crisis, I repeatedly come back to tank armour. An ultra-modern tank is almost impossible to kill because it is covered with a mixture of ceramic, textile and metal plating that is designed to disperse the incoming energy of an anti-tank projectile: laterally.
After it's done its job the armour does not look pretty, but it works - as long as you don't get hit again.
Ask any actor, a mask is powerful. While the purpose of realism in acting is to strip away the pretence and make the actor expose their soul, on their face, for real - a mask does the opposite. It creates instant power and tension.
It makes the expression on the face immune to feeling, and therefore empathy. Masks are frightening.
In February I wrote a blog called "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere". With the global Occupy protests yesterday it is still looking quite accurate. But it's now clear there is a 21st reason. And a 22nd. We've had nine months of political paralysis. And people have begun to feel the economic permafrost setting in.
I went down to Paternoster Square to observe the first few hours of the London protest. The police sealed off the square, which is private property, so the protesters squatted the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. They had a big, sit-down general assembly and then broke into small circles, cross-legged, then got back together and decided to stay the night. At that point there were around 2,000 people.
There are two kinds of people at present: those who know in a vague way that the 1930s was a bad time, and those who have studied the detail and understand the economics of why it went bad.
The latter are now getting publicly terrified because they can see, very clearly, the danger of doing it all again.
I only met Steve Jobs once, and it was not exactly a meeting. I'd been sent to cover the launch of iTunes Europe and, getting slightly nauseous at the scale of fawning over the guy and his 99p per track music, I decided to take a quite critical line.
My rationale was that in an age where P2P file sharing was taking down the walled garden of intellectual property rights, only a bunch of oldsters would go on paying for their music.
The basic situation this Wednesday morning, with markets yo-yoing and default insurance costs for major banks astronomic, is as follows:
1) Greece remains on the edge of default. Its revised budget deficit numbers on 3 October (8.5% deficit in 2011) were expected, but they mean any disbursement of the 8bn euro tranche by the Troika has to be done using the fig leaf of "we have plans to close the gap next year").
Paul joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. He covered the corporate scandals that followed: Enron and Worldcom.
His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He has covered stories as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, gang violence on Merseyside, the social impact of mobile phones in Africa and the rise of Aymara nationalism in Bolivia.
Paul was one of the BBC’s first bloggers and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
He covered the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and, “has hardly stopped for breath since then”, reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos.
Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 1960 he studied music and politics at Sheffield University, switching to journalism in the early 1990s.
He is the author of two books: Live Working or Die Fighting, How the working class went global; and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed.
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Mark UrbanDiplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight
Insights into the the global struggle for peace and security
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