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Last Friday night, I was cycling along Clarendon Drive, in Putney, when I met an angry black cab driver, mobile in hand. "There's a couple of kids down there just calmly walking along the street, smashing car windows and taking the radios," he said. "I've been calling 999 but it's an answer phone. And you know even if you did get through, the police wouldn't come for 20 minutes."
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.
Reader views (9)
The cabbie and Gilligan are missing the point....it's the parent's of the window smashing/radio nicking yobs that need talking too.It is not the Police's job to parent kids. This is the main problem of society today. My children are teenagers and don't carry on like this. Neither do those children of my relatives/friends. Benefited up, predominantly single mothers, who don't give tuppence what Marlon, Omar, Brandon, Kylie or any other crassly named brat are up to have no social conscience. The parent's are above the law. Until the baby's pushing baby's in your local high street stop getting the mandatory right to free council accommodation (and moving in the boyfriend for free (who may or may not work))then nothing will change. The Police are not here to run people's lives. It was Livingstone that ruined London by wanting it to be the "most diverse city in the world". Quite simply. Why? We now have the most multi-cultural crime ridden capital of the world thanks to him.
- Romangas, Bushey,Herts.
Noo.. Now that we have an incompetent mayor, we should be moving as many things out of his control as possible, not the other way around..
- Daniel, Camden
The police need to be beyond the influence of politicians and their ideas. This idea that allowing the police to be dictated to by a politician compromise the neutrality and the effectiveness of the police force. Any attempt to politicise the police will be met with hostility and resistance from in he force itself and from a very very concerned public.
- Jefferson, chelsea
For the Met Commissioner to comment on the policy concerning the governance of his force is itself a political act, as was his congratulating Johnson on his election. Judges don't make comments like this, neither do Permanent Secretaries: they offer their opinion in private if asked, and in public uphold the structure in which they serve. Sir Ian's conduct indicates that he doesn't really understand what a public servant IS.
- Mdj, Leyton, e10 london
It just goes to show, we cannot have a politically correct police force and law and order. One or the other not both. Also I want prisons that criminals just do not want to go back to. No play stations, no TV, no freedom to cook your own meals, no gyms, no central heating just nothing of home comforts.
- Mike, London
Blair is the most political Met Police Chiefs we have ever had. It's a bit rich to hear of this complaint. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
- Chuck Unsworth, London
Leaving aside the obvious issue about his continued inability to distinguish between the legislative and the executive, why is Blair not wearing a tie? Does he think it makes him look cool and approachable? I think it makes him look superfluous.
- St, London
Sir Ian Blair is not a leader, he is just the senior manager of an only marginally disciplined mob. Boris has a mandate to get the capital policed the way that he and the majority of law abiding citizens want it policed. There are plenty of examples of cities around the world where a poor law and order situation has been turned around. So if the current Commissioner won't act, Boris should get someone in who will.
- Peter Haldane, London
Given Sir Ian's close links with the previous Mayor and the Labour government, especially when Tony Blair Prime Minister, it's a little late for him to be bleating about politicisation.
The sooner we have direct accountability for our policing, either through the Mayor or, better still, through our local councils, the sooner we will have a police force able to meet the demands of Londoners.
- Stephen Dearden, London, UK
