SIR IAN BLAIR is a man of literary tastes, but even he probably did not anticipate a plot-twist quite as dramatic as this. On Thursday night, the head of the Metropolitan Police was under intense pressure to produce results, but by yesterday afternoon he could claim a major breakthrough in the biggest police operation since the Second World War.

Sir Ian’s allies will hail yesterday’s events as a victory for his radical approach to policing, based on modern management techniques.

Others may be less charitable, for the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police — outspoken, cerebral and liberal — has attracted equal praise and censure over the past three tumultuous weeks.

To Sir Ian’s supporters, he is “the thinking man’s policeman”, a radical intellectual more like the boss of a modern corporation than a police chief who is prepared to shake up a hidebound institution. For his detractors, including some within his own ranks, Oxfordeducated Sir Ian spends too much time working on image and enforcing political correctness, and not enough on solving crime.

That debate has been raging since Sir Ian took over last February, but it has been thrown into sharp relief by the terror attacks on London. Hours after the first bombings, he was on television calling for calm in measured tones. For many, the sturdy uniformed figure, with police cap clamped under one arm and gritted jaw, radiated a bullish solidity. “I thought he struck exactly the right tone,” says one senior police officer, who describes himself as “not a particular fan” of the Commissioner. “He was controlled, direct and tough.”

The slips came later and when they did, Sir Ian’s critics were ready to pounce. Too early, he said that the explosives “certainly were not homemade”, and declared that there was “absolutely nothing to suggest” that the explosion on the No 30 bus was the work of a suicide bomber.

He left a peculiar impression by remarking that his officers were “very tired men and women, but they are wearing big grins”; others were baffled by the observation that “al-Qaeda does not act like some classic Graham Greene cell”. Was this the moment for obscure literary allusion?

More serious was his insistence, in the hours after the shooting of the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, that the dead man had been “directly linked” to the investigation. Later he argued that the “underlying cause” of the death was not police action, but terrorism. With an innocent man dead, this seemed defensive and ill-timed.

The attention paid to the Commissioner’s every utterance is a reflection of the monumental task he faces. Catching the terrorists is only one aspect: he must simultaneously restore confidence in a nervous populace while warning of future attacks, reassure Britain’s minorities while trying to root out the terrorist canker in the Islamic community, and defend his officers while displaying impartiality. The roles of politician, diplomat and cop, all rolled into one.

Ian Warwick Blair was born in Chester 52 years ago, to middle-class, Christian parents. He was destined to become a doctor. At Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Tony Blair, he read English and dreamt of becoming an actor. His parents were astonished when he declared that he was joining the Metropolitan Police in 1974. He rose steadily and easily up the ranks to become Chief Constable of Surrey in 1998.

After five years as deputy commissioner, he won the top job and arrived with a mandate to shake up the force of 35,000 officers and 15,000 civilian staff, and drag it away from what was seen as a sexist, homophobic and racist past.

In 1999, he delivered a withering attack on the bigoted “canteen culture” of the force: “The police service is still trying to serve a multicultural and modern nation with a homogenous and traditional working culture,” he said. Sir Ian’s culture is very different, for this is surely the first head of the Metropolitan Police who quotes Voltaire, from memory, in public.

Last Thursday, during a two-hour meeting with the watchdog committee that monitors the Met, Sir Ian summoned up the words of the 18th-century French philosopher when asked if he would reprimand the press over its reporting of the investigation. Sir Ian recalled that Voltaire had been invited, on his deathbed, to renounce the Devil, to which he replied: “This is no time for making new enemies.” Traditionally, British police deploy the blunt language of PC Plod, while “proceeding in a northerly direction” . Not this one. During the morning meeting, Sir Ian’s vocabulary included such unlikely police terms as “invidious”, “encapsulate”, “ex cathedra”, “antithesis” and “counsel of perfection”.

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