The Met is still out of control - sort it, Boris

I have walked away from private and public bureaucracies wondering if anyone will take responsibility for various misdeeds. But the unnamed officials in the Metropolitan Police Authority who threw away the millions were not trying to escape accountability to the public or Parliament but to their own superiors' orders. Not because they were fraudsters interested in ­personal gain but because they could not resist the lure of easy money for their organisation.

Consider the facts. In April 2008, the authority's treasurer, Ken Hunt, realised that the implausibly high interest rates Icelandic banks were offering were probably fools' gold. Perhaps he also grasped that an island with a population not much bigger than that of the average London borough had a huge banking sector it could never bail out. So Hunt ordered Met funds to be pulled out of Landsbanki, one of the most reckless banks on the island.

He appeared a cautious and far-sighted civil servant. But he clearly was not in control of the Met's Byzantine bureaucracy. Other finance officers, acting without his approval, according to the official report, sent £30 million back to Landsbanki. They made the last deposit a mere fortnight before the Icelandic banking system collapsed last October. By now, even the indolent credit reference agencies everyone has condemned for failing to spot the dangers of sub-prime mortgages were warning that Iceland was an accident waiting to happen. Even so, no one in the Met could to stop rogue accountants operating as freelancers.

David Cameron and George Osborne are promising a crackdown on waste. It ought to be to their profound embarrassment that the MPA continues to flounder under a Tory Mayor, Boris Johnson, even though he had not taken the chair at the MPA at the time when the losses happened.

John McFall, the Labour chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee, was right to call on Johnson to make amends for a "massive breakdown in corporate governance".

The Mayor must now identify the officials responsible and punish them if they deserve it. More seriously, he must get a grip of this sprawling, obese organisation, which trundles on like a juggernaut with no one at the wheel.