October 3, 2008 Sir Ian (finally) falls on his truncheon Daily Mail, 3 October 2008 So he’s finally gone. Sir Ian Blair has been forced out of office — and about time too. His resignation brings to an ignominious end one of the most ill-starred and destructive top appointments in the history not just of the Met but of any police force in Britain. The last of many last straws was a corruption scandal, with allegations that he used public money to pay an agency run by a close friend a five-figure sum as an ‘image consultant’, one of a series of questionable deals he made with this firm. Leave aside the question of whether this broke any rules. The idea that a police officer should need an ‘image consultant’ at all is in itself quite astounding. Who on earth does he think he is! But then, Sir Ian clearly thought he was a cut above a normal police officer attending to boring details like cutting crime and protecting the public. Indeed, his tenure at the top of the Met was characterised from the start by a combination of preening arrogance and serial incompetence. The worse the damage done to the reputation of the force under his lamentable command, the more preposterously he strutted about. His stewardship of the Met saw the reputation of Britain’s most important police force put through the shredder. It is hard to think of any senior officer who has had a more destructive impact. Obviously, the most spectacular debacle was the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station after they mistakenly identified him as a suicide bomber. The aftermath of that fiasco highlighted the question that was repeatedly raised during Sir Ian’s period in office: How on earth did such a man manage to cling on to his job? It wasn’t just that the Stockwell shooting was the outcome of shambolic police procedures. It wasn’t just that Sir Ian admitted that during the shooting and for 24 hours afterwards, he had no idea what was going on in his own force. Most shockingly of all, he initially breached his statutory duty to refer such an incident to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Meanwhile, he was to be seen grandstanding on TV with information he had got off the television and which was quickly shown to be wrong. It defies belief that he was not sacked after that shameful episode. But this was merely the most spectacular example of his unsuitability for the vital office he filled. His trademark as Commissioner was a deadly combination of incompetence and political correctness, both of which fed into and reinforced each other. In the past few months, the Met has been all but paralysed by a string of legal actions brought by ethnic minority officers claiming racial discrimination. For sure, many of these cases are mischievous and some of these officers have been behaving disgracefully. But that is a direct result of Sir Ian’s fetish of antiracism and promotion of ‘diversity’ within the Met, junking common sense and fairness along the way. This was matched by his blunders and gaffes displaying lack of professionalism and poor judgment, equalled only by a truly monumental arrogance. Sir Ian seemed to fancy himself as an intellectual who had unaccountably found himself slumming it as a police officer. While Londoners gave up bothering to report crimes to the police who had vanished from their streets, he was delivering in the 2005 Dimbleby lecture his cerebral thoughts about the state of society — in which he revealed that he didn’t have a clue about what the police were actually for. The reason this absurd figure remained in office for so long was surely the way he sucked up to Labour politicians, pushing their pet ideologies and even specific policies which just happened to be on the New Labour agenda during the last General Election campaign. Sir Ian is, however, merely the most extreme example of a sickness that has crippled the police way beyond the Met. Instead of protecting the public against bullying and injustice, the police have been turned by their Chief Commissioner into an instrument of bullying and injustice. Law-abiding folk find themselves harassed and even prosecuted, while the police look the other way from miscreants who tick boxes marked ‘ diversity’ or ‘disadvantaged’. What people want is a police chief who is not a politicised stooge spouting the gibberish he learned in a university arts or social science department, not some posturing peacock playing to the political or fashionable gallery, but an officer who will prevent crime, promote public tranquillity and bring criminals to justice. Sir Ian’s successor must take the pc out of policing, restore the Met’s shattered morale and make the public believe again that the police are actually on their side. No easy task. The Met is now a veritable Augean stable to be cleansed. |
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