We’ve had stalker cops, rapist cops, and killer cops. Some are all three. I’d almost forgotten that we have always had the most common flavour of utterly useless cops.

That’s the baseline standard.

Now we have the Nicola Bulley case where police incompetence is being showcased like never before. They’re all so crap, they can’t even master the basic skill of deception for survival.

The senior police officer has been copping some flak as an apparently flaky cop after tottering into pressers in her unfeasibly high Louboutins, hissy-flicking her age-unconvincing, jet-black Cleopatra barnet, and addressing the throbbing mass in much the same way as a Brazzers actress might an anticipated audience on shufflevision.

I’ll boss, you toss.

Of course, excluding the nearest and dearest, none of the protagonists in this caper really give a hoot about the rambling dog walker. She’s just a convenient vehicle for the attention-seeking commentariat who spooge out their concern/outrage/compassion/opinions *delete as appropriate in order to shoot spunk into their own worthless profiles

Let’s hope she’s safe, but she won’t now be too keen on showing her face after being exposed as an incorrigible pisshead with a penchant for domestic flare-ups.

But the salient question about this escapade is why Lancashire Police have gone full tilt on a budget-busting bonanza for one hapless boozer, while the remaining 300,000 missing people in the UK get inkjet-printed, lost-cat, lamppost A4s?

It’s been all about PR and making a high-profile splash on an incident they thought they’d quickly solve.

A woman involved in a domestic dispute, storms off. The cops, hopping onto the bandwagon of #metoo and outrage at misogyny – hype it up as a missing vulnerable person and rush to show how no stone will be left unturned, probably thinking that they wouldn’t need to flip over too many before she would be found half-pickled on a park bench.

And then she wasn’t, and they’d only pulled down their own pants – they’d created a monster that was soon running amok, trashing all in its wake.

If you want to know the time, you don’t need to ask a policeman.

It’s time for root-and-branch reform of the police service.