On the day in July 2005 that Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on the
London Underground by armed police, Scotland Yard was in turmoil.
Suicide bombers had killed 52 people a fortnight before, four more terrorists
had tried and failed to copy that atrocity and now police had grabbed an
innocent man on a Tube train at Stockwell and shot him in the head seven
times.
Everyone in Scotland Yard seemed to know that they had shot the wrong man.
Everyone, that is, except the man at the top.
Sir Ian Blair’s officers were working round the clock, sleeping in shifts in
hotels or bedding down in their offices.
At 7pm Sir Ian left his office for his Central London apartment. In the words
of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, he was “almost totally
uninformed” about what had happened at Stockwell.
That day has come to symbolise Sir Ian’s leadership of the Met. It lacked
grip. He did not know what was going on, seemed unable to find out and had
nobody who was prepared to tell him.
Sir Ian had been commissioner for only five months when the Stockwell shooting
occurred – but it was to cast a long shadow over his period as Britain’s top
policeman.
When he took the job in February 2005, succeeding Sir John Stevens, the new
commissioner was hailed as a progressive reformer. He was to be “a thinking
man’s copper” who would sweep away the macho canteen culture and create a
diverse force that reflected the city it served. The new man was bold,
ambitious and confident.
Today Sir Ian is noticeably less confident, watching every word in case he
says the wrong thing and triggers another barrage of negative headlines.
The visionary went some time ago and left in his place a diminished figure
whose sole focus seemed to be staying in the job while repeating the mantra
that whatever anybody said about him, crime was falling.
Sir Ian turned up at meetings armed with crime statistics to back up his
argument while appearing impotent in the face of a spiralling teenage murder
rate in the capital.
He leaves Scotland Yard haunted by accusations of racism, allegations of
impropriety in the award of contracts and the shooting of Mr de Menezes.
But he has also been hunted by elements of the media who loathed him for being
“the PC PC”, by political voices from the Left and Right and, most
harmfully, enemies within the Yard.
Sir Ian was both extremely media conscious, courting some journalists whom he
believed would promote his image as a new type of police chief, and
incredibly thin-skinned when coverage was critical.
Ian Warwick Blair joined the Met in 1974 as a graduate recruit on a fast-track
promotion programme. Born in Chester in 1953, he was a boarder at Wrekin
College, Shropshire, and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. He had
childhood dreams of being a doctor and undergraduate ideas of becoming an
actor but, perhaps oddly for a Seventies student, enrolled as a policeman.
He sped up the ranks, wrote an influential book on the investigation of rape
cases and by 1988 was a superintendent. There were spells at the Home Office
working with HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and he was Assistant Chief
Constable at Thames Valley overseeing the policing of the Newbury bypass
protests in the mid1990s. By January 1998 he was Chief Constable in Surrey
and beginning to show his reforming colours by creating community support
officers.
Eager, and in favour with the new Labour Government, Sir Ian applied for the
commissioner’s job at the Met but had to settle for the position of deputy
to the larger than life Stevens. It was a post he is regarded as having
filled successfully.
It became an inevitability that Sir Ian would succeed to the top job, and when
he took over he immediately made waves with talk of pursuing middle-class
dinner party cocaine users. Within two months he was courting political
controversy by speaking out in favour of the Government’s proposals for a
national ID card scheme. Many were concerned that Sir Ian was blurring the
lines between police independence and party politics.
His politicisation of the office returned over the issue of extending the
power to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. Senior Met
officers were authorised to lobby MPs for the change. The Government lost a
parliamentary vote on the issue – Tony Blair’s first defeat in the Commons –
but the damage to police independence was also significant. The
commissioner’s alliance with Labour also served to make him a legitimate
target for the Conservative Party, something that has alarmed many senior
officers who think that he has done irreparable harm to the most senior
office in policing.
While Sir Ian’s political manoeuvrings might have been miscalcula-tions, his
public pronouncements were often unscripted mishaps.
On the morning of July 7, 2005, he was interviewed on Radio 4 about the choice
of London for the 2012 Olympics. Sir Ian said his force was the envy of the
world in the field of counter-ter-rorism and security. A couple of hours
later British-born al-Qaeda suicide bombers blew themselves up on London’s
transport network, killing 52 innocent people.
If his boast about antiterrorism was unfortunate timing, Sir Ian’s choice of
words over the Soham murders was singularly ill-judged. “Almost nobody can
understand” why the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells became such a
huge story, Sir Ian said in a discussion over why some cases grabbed more
headlines than others.
The commissioner’s senior colleagues were horrified, he became stuck with the
media label “gaffe-prone” and a public apology followed. Sir Ian took to
recording his telephone calls, only to be pilloried for unlawfully taping
conversations with Lord Goldsmith, QC, the Attorney-General. He almost lost
his job over that but escaped with a stern public rebuke.
The commissioner’s apologies became a regular occurrence, especially over the
shooting of Mr de Menezes.
The dead man’s family was not, however, in the mood for accepting the Met’s
expressions of contrition, and they pursued redress through inquiries and
the courts.
The death of Mr de Menezes was the incident that came to dominate Sir Ian’s
period in office. That one fatality overshadowed both the murders on 7/7 and
the Met’s success in catching the would-be bombers of 21/7.
In the midst of that fast-moving operation, Sir Ian told a press conference
that the Stockwell shooting was “directly linked” to the hunt for the 21/7
bombers. His senior commanders winced as he uttered the words, believing he
had deviated from the careful line they had agreed to follow. Sir Ian did
not know – and was not told for 24 hours – that Mr de Menezes’s death had
been a catastrophic error. The clamour for his resignation grew and was
reinforced by a loss of support within the Yard. He had never won the
affection or loyalty of the rank and file, but as every month passed he lost
the respect of his senior colleagues.
His ability to alienate his top team was extraordinary. One night last year he
invited a large group to dinner at a London restaurant, only to restrict the
meal to a main course before asking everybody to pay their own bill.
When the Met stood trial last autumn on health and safety charges over the
operation that led to Mr de Menezes’s death, most of Sir Ian’s senior
colleagues advised him to plead guilty and bring the case to a swift
conclusion. The commissioner disagreed and staged an aggressive courtroom
defence.
An Old Bailey jury returned a guilty verdict against the Yard in November 2007
and the calls for Sir Ian to stand down now became a clamour. The Times
understands that Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, took soundings about her powers
to dismiss Sir Ian, but in the face of Tory demands that he be sacked, the
Government was not prepared to bow to political pressure.
This summer brought the simmering discontent within the Yard to a head with
destructive consequences for the commissioner and his force. The final
unravelling began with a series of leaks about the award of lucrative Yard
contracts to Impact-Plus, a consultancy company run by Andy Miller, a friend
and skiing partner of Sir Ian. The commissioner denied any wrongdoing and
said that he had declared his interest, but was revealed to have sat in on a
meeting at which rival contractors presented their bids. This week it was
alleged that a £15,000 contract to advise him on his image was awarded to
Impact-Plus without anyone else tendering.
An independent inquiry is under way and while the situation might not reveal
evidence of corruption it has raised serious questions about Sir Ian’s
judgment.
The row over Mr Miller was followed swiftly by a race discrimination
employment claim by the Met’s third most senior officer, Assistant
Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur. After weeks of leaking by sources close to Mr
Ghaffur, the officer went public with a press conference in August while Sir
Ian was on holiday. Mr Ghaffur and Sir Ian have been at loggerheads for
years since the former was caught up in an anticorruption inquiry overseen
by the latter. Operation Helios led to Mr Ghaffur being photographed and
monitored by Met surveillance officers when he was in contact with the
target of the inquiry, his friend Ali Dizaei.
Mr Dizaei is now president of the national Black Police Association, which has
given strong backing to Mr Ghaffur’s race discrimination claim against Sir
Ian.
To be accused of corruption and racism at the same time was hugely damaging
for Sir Ian. The report into the contracts affair would be damaging and the
Ghaffur tribunal could be scandalous.
But Sir Ian protested his innocence robustly and even those who wanted him to
go did not believe that he should depart with smears of racist or corrupt
activity hanging over him.
In the end it was not the contracts affair, the race row or the Stockwell
shooting that cost him his job. Sir Ian was brought down by something of his
own making – the politicisation of the Office of Commissioner of the
Metropolis.
A new Conservative administration at City Hall made it clear to him this week
that it did not want a new Labour appointee at the top of Scotland Yard.
With almost no support in his force or in Whitehall, Sir Ian felt that he
had no option but to resign.
Although he is attempting to go with dignity, he leaves behind him a damaged
and demoralised force in need of urgent repair before it faces up to
policing London 2012, the biggest operational challenge in its history.
In his own words
“You can’t come in here without a pair of copper-bottomed trousers. This is a
very tough place” February 2005
“People think it’s OK to use cocaine but I don’t think it’s OK. It has become
socially acceptable in some areas. People are having dinner parties where
they drink less wine and snort more cocaine. I don’t like that. We will have
to do something about it, make a few examples of some people” February
2005, first day in office
“There is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist. The question is
how we help the vulnerable young people who are attracted to violence” February
2005
“The Met is seen as the gold standard of policing across the world . . . We’ve
been described as the envy of the policing world in relation to
counter-terrorism . . . London is a terrorist target, particularly the
postcard sites of London . . . we have a long track record of dealing with
Irish republican terrorism and we’ve now upped our game” Morning
of July 7, 2005
“The information I have available is that this shooting is directly linked to
the ongoing and expanding antiterrorist operation. Any death is deeply
regrettable, I understand the man was challenged and refused to obey” July
2005 press conference after the de Menezes shooting
“I believe that the media are guilty of institutional racism in the way they
report deaths . . . If you look at the murders in Soham, almost nobody can
understand why that dreadful story became the biggest story in Britain” January
2006
“I am getting . . . conscious of the fact that this position is becoming
public property. I’m looking back at the year and realising it is
increasingly difficult to be open about my views” January 2006
“Somewhere out there between 50 and 90 days is a limit which would seem very
sensible” On terror detention powers, October 2007
“If I believed that my staying would damage the service I have given most of
my working life to, then of course I would go . . . I’m a bit of a limpet. I
did not at any stage consider resigning” December 2007
“Most people are pleased to get a couple of letters published in The
Times in their lifetime. To have two leaders written about oneself in a
matter of weeks would normally be very flattering. However, newspapers do
not always get everything right. As Mark Twain said after reading an account
of his own death in the New York Journal, ‘The report of my death is
an exaggeration’ ” September 2008
What they said
“I think it is very important that the Met Police Commissioner respects the
law and stays independent of politics. It is time for Blair the Commissioner
to create some distance from his political namesake" Shami
Chakrabati, of Liberty, after Sir Ian supported ID cards, April 2005
“Not everyone likes him and he can be very dour, but he is straight. He is not
a liar” David Blunkett, January 2006
“He has been rebuked in very strong terms. I said this must never happen
again; it is unacceptable” Len Duvall, chairman of the Metropolitan
Police Authority, March 2006, after Sir Ian admits taping the
Attorney-General’s phone calls
“When the Commissioner left New Scotland Yard mid-evening on the 22nd July
2005 he was almost totally uninformed about the postshooting events at
Stockwell. He did not know of the considerable information within the MPS
[Metropolitan Police Service] in relation to the emerging identity for Mr de
Menezes and the likelihood that he was not involved in terrorism” Stockwell
Two Independent Police Complaints Commission report, July 2007
“The most important and immediate action that the Home Secretary can and
should take, in these circumstances, is to replace Sir Ian Blair with a
commissioner who can command the force’s confidence, restore the public’s
trust and protect the nation’s security” David Davis, Shadow
Home Secretary, November 2007
“His position is clearly untenable” Boris Johnson, mayoral
candidate, November 2007
“I’m going to have to have confidence in his leadership of the Met insofar as
I can’t remove him. I do think they (the Met) need a yank on the steering
wheel and that’s what I intend to provide” Boris Johnson,
April 2008
“My current case is essentially to do with my treatment at the highest levels
of the Met, in particular the discrimination I have been subject to over a
long period of time by the present commissioner, Sir Ian Blair” Assistant
Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, August 2008
“London needs a policeman, not a politician, in charge of the Met. Sir Ian has
said he would stand down if he thought staying on would damage the force.
The signs of damage are too blatant to ignore” The Times, leader,
Sept 2008
Britain’s top policeman
— The Metropolitan Police Commissioner earns £240,813
— He is in charge of more than 30,000 police officers and 10,000
support staff
— He has national responsibility for counter-terrorism strategy
— He has responsibility for protecting the Royal Family
— His day-to-day responsibilities include cutting youth knife
crime
— He is appointed “at Her Majesty’s Pleasure” after the Home
Secretary has made a recommendation as defined in the Greater London
Authority Act 1999
