The London mayor’s office at the top of City Hall commands spectacular views
over the Thames at Tower Bridge. Last Wednesday Sir Ian Blair, the
Metropolitan police commissioner, was, according to an insider, “quite jolly
and chatty” as he walked into the room for a meeting with Boris Johnson, the
mayor.
That morning Johnson had formally taken over from Len Duvall, the London
Labour leader, as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), the
force’s watchdog. Overnight he had become Blair’s new political master and
this was their first formal chat about the future of policing in the capital.
Blair must have known something was up the moment he entered the room. Johnson
was accompanied by Kit Malthouse, the MPA’s executive vice-chairman and the
mayor’s hard man, and Catherine Crawford, its chief executive in charge of
personnel.
Far from bumbling, as is his popular image, Johnson cut to the chase. In a
three-minute speech, the mayor explained he felt this was the time for a new
broom at the Met. “You have so many distractions. I want new leadership. I
want you to leave by Christmas,” he told Blair.
Malthouse then chipped in. He made it clear that with superior Tory numbers on
the MPA, Blair, a new Labour appointee, could be forced out at its next
meeting, which will take place tomorrow.
“Kit made it clear that if Blair didn’t want to go voluntarily, there were
tougher ways of doing it,” a colleague said.
Stunned, Blair saw the writing on the wall. He left the building soon
afterwards.
The Met boss later returned to his luxury penthouse flat in Chelsea, west
London. That evening he was comforted by his wife, Felicity, who throughout
his troubled tenure at the Met has been his closest ally and adviser. The
couple would have concluded that the game was up.
The next morning Blair went to see Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, to inform
her of his decision to resign. Smith did not dissent. “Nobody tried to
change his mind,” said one official. “Those who know him know that once he’s
made his mind up, he’s made his mind up. So that was it. Reluctantly we
accepted his decision.”
Blair had become the first serving Met commissioner to be forced to stand down
in more than a century.
The attacks on Johnson began almost immediately, with Smith criticising him
for bringing “party politics” into policing. The prime minister’s aides let
it be known that Gordon Brown had called Blair in an attempt to persuade him
to stay on.
On Friday, Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire and
previously considered a possible Met commissioner, ruled himself out of
contention for the job. He accused Johnson of thinking of “short-term
political expediency” in defenestrating Blair.
The truth, however, is that many people, both at Westminster and at Scotland
Yard, will be privately delighted this weekend that Johnson did their dirty
work for them in giving Blair the final push.
IF the manner of Blair’s resignation was dramatic, it had been coming for many
months. Indeed, given the controversies that have dogged his
commissionership, it is remarkable that he managed to survive so long since
taking over from Lord Stevens 3½ years ago.
Blair appeared jinxed after a succession of blunders. In an infamous gaffe, he
suggested that “almost nobody” could understand why the media had given so
much coverage to the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in
2002.
He was forced to apologise to Lord Goldsmith, then the attorney-general, after
it became known that Blair had secretly recorded their telephone
conversations. Blair became the butt of jokes among senior colleagues when
it came out — after his office was raided to retrieve the tapes — that he
had unintentionally recorded phone conversations with his elderly mother.
Perhaps what damaged him most was his inability to manage those colleagues
properly and the culture of infighting that developed at Scotland Yard. He
fell out with a large number of his senior team.
His relationship with Andy Hayman, then the head of counterterrorism,
deteriorated after Hayman failed to warn him that the man the Met had just
killed at Stockwell Tube station, Jean Charles de Menezes, was an innocent
Brazilian.
He rowed with Sir Paul Stephenson, the man who became his deputy and who has
now been appointed acting commissioner, when Stephenson refused to accept a
bonus after the de Menezes killing, though Blair had said he wanted to apply
for his.
Another senior officer, Brian Paddick, threatened legal action against Blair
after the commissioner publicly challenged his account of who knew what
about the shooting.
No fewer than five senior black and Asian figures at the Met, headed by
Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner, have launched claims for racial
discrimination against the force.
When the Met was found guilty last year of breaching health and safety laws
over de Menezes’s death, the Tories called for Blair’s head. He refused to
go on the grounds that the case had not shown any “systemic failures”.
It was clear, however, even to his allies that although his troubles were not
always of his own making, they were his responsibility. Each successive
gaffe seemed to highlight the flaws in Blair’s character. Every blunder lost
him more friends and made him enemies.
One senior Home Office official chided him for having “foot-in-mouth disease”.
A colleague told reporters that his boss was “off his trolley”.
Whether or not Johnson had won the mayoral election this year, Blair’s fate
was in effect sealed by the disclosure in The Sunday Times three months ago
of a procurement scandal involving the granting of £3- worth of Met
contracts to a firm run by his best friend and skiing partner, Andy Miller,
a millionaire businessman. It raised the possibility of sleaze as a new
element in the long-running saga of Blair’s litany of misjudgments.
Blair insists that he did nothing wrong, but here was a story of large sums of
public money being paid to one of his closest friends after decisions in
which Blair had some involvement. He claims that he did not influence the
granting of the contracts. However, even some of his closest supporters
dismiss this as “bollocks”.
After the disclosures, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the chief inspector of
constabulary, was appointed to conduct a formal inquiry. Flanagan’s team has
been following the paper trail. Asked last month how serious the situation
was, one official with knowledge of the case said: “I think it is probably
terminal. It’s one of those things where you fear the paperwork may find you
out.”
The Flanagan inquiry was like a ticking bomb under Blair’s career. It has been
running in parallel with the inquest into the death of de Menezes, which is
expected to end at the beginning of December. If the jury returns a verdict
of unlawful killing, a murder probe is likely to be launched against some
Met officers.
Several key MPA members were nevertheless prepared to support Blair over
Stockwell. Insiders say, however, that the same people were preparing to
call for his departure if Flanagan criticised him over the contracts. It was
therefore clear to everyone that he would most likely be out by the end of
the year.
At this point, politics intruded. In July, Johnson and Malthouse went to meet
Smith privately to discuss Blair’s fate. What was said at the meeting is a
closely guarded secret, but soon afterwards Johnson let it be known that
when he became MPA chairman on October 1 he wanted a clean slate.
Home Office officials also began to talk about how Smith would be unlikely to
oppose any move by Johnson to depose Blair. “No one is indispensable,” a
senior Whitehall official remarked last month when asked if Smith still had
full confidence in the Met boss.
It was a win-win situation for both sides. Johnson would look decisive by
forcing out an unpopular commissioner; the government would have a messy
situation taken off its hands — and if it was lucky it could make political
capital out of Johnson’s actions.
If there was a tacit agreement between Labour and the Tories to dump Blair, he
certainly knew nothing about it. He continued to believe he could win round
the Tories and work with them at least until the end of his five-year
contract in 2010.
One former friend said: “Ian was probably a little naive in believing that
Boris and Kit wouldn’t act. He was probably the only person in the Met and
the MPA who believed that.”
To his credit, though, when the final act came, Blair conceded quickly.
Colleagues had feared a long and nasty battle, with the commissioner digging
his heels in. At the end, his departure was dignified and gracious. There is
talk of a large pay-off and even a peerage.
THIS weekend, as Blair nurses his loss with his wife, attention is turning to
a new controversy over the appointment of the next commissioner.
Apparently stung by the response to his actions, Johnson expressed some
contrition in a note he sent to MPA members. “I am also sorry that in the
fast-moving events of the last 24 hours I have not had a chance to
communicate with you directly about Sir Ian Blair’s resignation,” he wrote.
However, there was evidence that he was determined to seize the initiative in
the appointment of the new commissioner. In an extraordinary exchange of
letters late on Friday evening, Johnson told Smith that he wanted to be
personally involved in interviewing candidates for the post.
Smith has made it clear that, whatever Johnson thinks, it is the home
secretary who ultimately recommends the new candidate to the Queen.
In a move that has horrified her officials, Johnson suggested that just he and
Smith should interview the final shortlist of candidates, bypassing
time-honoured arrangements that require a panel of representatives from the
MPA and Whitehall and an independent person to do the job.
Johnson also told Smith that he wants Stephenson, his apparent favourite, to
stay in post for a “fairly lengthy consolidation period” before the
appointment process gets under way. Smith’s officials say they want the job
to be advertised straight away.
One senior officer said: “It is beginning to look like a pre-ordained
outcome and overall a well-planned operation to remove one man and install
another.”
With Bettison out of the running, Stephenson is the clear favourite for the
post, although he is likely to face questions over his role in a 2005
internal audit that concluded there was nothing of concern about Blair’s
role in contracts awarded to his close friend. His main rival is likely to
be Bernard Hogan-Howe, the highly regarded chief constable of Merseyside.
Whichever man prevails, he will be at the centre of a political storm that
shows no sign of blowing itself out.
Johnson’s hitman
It was an open secret in the upper echelons of Scotland Yard that Kit
Malthouse, Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor, was no fan of Sir Ian Blair and
that administering the coup de grâce last Wednesday would not have been too
onerous a task.
The ruthless former Westminster city councillor and hedge fund executive
privately detests the views of the politically correct, left-leaning former
police commissioner. A clue to the depth of his feeling came in a newspaper
article he wrote in January. “Sir Ian walks, talks and acts like a
politician, yet he is neither elected nor, it seems, is he accountable,”
Malthouse wrote in a piece he still displays on his website. “Sir Ian is
either a policeman or a politician, but he can’t continue to be both.”
Malthouse is best known as the man who brokered the rather sorry deal with
Dame Shirley Porter, the former Tory leader of Westminster, which resulted
in her reimbursing the council’s ratepayers with £12m over the so-called
“homes for votes” scandal.
Malthouse stepped down as chief executive of the hedge fund Alpha Strategic to
become finance director after his election to the London Assembly in May.
Blair is like a personification of the 'institutionalized failure' that seems to have permeated our current political (he certainly is...) establishment. It is a joy to watch him fall, but it will not solve our society's problems.
For that, the broom needs to sweep through Parliament itself....
Paul Williams, London, England