Make the Met accountable to Boris: it's what he needs

I'd passed the two boys myself a minute before. Although I didn't see them smashing anything, they did indeed look up to no good - and they certainly didn't look worried that anyone might catch them.

I don't know how it all ended. Maybe the police eventually did come. Even if they didn't, they have a fair excuse; late on a Friday night must be about the busiest time of the week.

But the incident summed up to me a feeling, widely expressed by lawabiding Londoners, that all is not well in the relationship between themselves and the Met. It is this which must lie somewhere behind that rather more significant policing event of the week, the leaked emails in which Kit Malthouse, police adviser to the Mayor, appeared to try his own smash-and-grab raid on Sir Ian Blair's official limousine.

The immediate cause of the dispute is the discovery that the Met has awarded valuable contracts to a man who happens to be Sir Ian's personal friend, triggering an official investigation into the Commissioner. Mr Malthouse appears to have wanted Sir Ian suspended, but was told the Mayor did not have that power.

This morning, Sir Ian has hit back, saying that "there is concern about the politicisation of the office of Commissioner". It's not a full confrontation, yet, between Boris and Blair - but it clearly could become one.

If it does, some of Sir Ian's cards are strong. According to the latest British Crime Survey, 55 per cent of Londoners think their local police do a "good" or "excellent" job - the same proportion as Dyfed-Powys, in unpopulated rural Wales. Given the immensely harder task of policing London, that is something of which the Met can be very proud. Both recorded crime and that as measured by the British Crime Survey under Sir Ian's commissionership are down sharply. They fell faster last year than in any other big-city force, except Merseyside.

Yet surveys take you only so far. We've just had a rather more comprehensive test of public opinion, a mayoral election - and for the first time in such an election, crime and policing was the big issue. It arguably did more than any other subject to swing votes to the Tories.

If public concern about crime is rising, even as crime itself is apparently falling, that looks like bad news for the Met. It may show that Londoners are losing faith in its statistics, or in its ability to tackle the problem, or in its choice of priorities.

Metropolitan liberals like myself worry that Sir Ian's Met spends too much of its time targeting the innocent (protestors, activists) or the trivial (kids calling each other names), while not always seeming able to get to grips with the seriously guilty (prolific career criminals). The broader public, meanwhile, probably accepts that crime overall is going down - but they worry that the crimes to which they attach the highest priority, such as child stabbings, appear to be going up.

At the operational level the Met is a superbly professional force. At the command level it is frankly a shambles. Sir Ian's topmost officers have more or less openly briefed against him. His own assistant commissioner, Tarique Ghaffur, has taken him to an employment tribunal. Unprecedentedly, the inquiry into Sir Ian's friendships is the second he has faced, the first being Stockwell - the defining disaster of his time, already resulting in the criminal conviction of the Met by an Old Bailey jury, and which will return to haunt Sir Ian when the inquest opens later this year.

Most of these events can be traced to Sir Ian's failures of leadership. It is hard to imagine any of them - let alone all of them - happening under his predecessor, Sir John Stevens. What must the average officer on the streets think when they see the Yard brass fighting each other in print? What must they think of Sir Ian? Actually, we kind of know - because a few years ago rank and file officers publicly announced they had no confidence in him.

And for Sir Ian Blair to protest that Boris is trying to "politicise" the office of Commissioner is like Pete Doherty complaining that someone is taking drugs. Sir Ian's open lobbying for New Labour laws and policy has identified the commissionership with a single party for the first time.

The truth, though, for anyone who professes horror at the " politicisation" of policing is that policing London is, and always has been, political. The police are just responsible to the wrong politicians. Officially, the relationship is a "tripartite" one between the Commissioner, the Home Secretary and Boris. In practice, the imprecision of this arrangement allows major failings in accountability which may help explain why the police have grown away from the public as they have.

IT IS right that the Commissioner should retain his independence in operations. It is right that the Home Secretary should keep some of her policy role, since the Met has national responsibilities. But because most of its work is about London, the balance of power in policy - and the choice of Commissioner - should be shifted from her to the Mayor, the person who most directly represents the people of London. The tension emerging in those emails comes because Boris was given a clear mandate by Londoners to change the way the city is policed, but lacks the power to do so.

So what happens next? Barring further pratfalls, always a possibility, Sir Ian is unlikely to depart at once. But he is most unlikely to have his contract renewed. And for all his stubbornness in clinging to office, he may help the cause of increased mayoral power, simply because his removal is so clearly justified.