THE thinking-man’s copper does not enjoy being told to engage brain before opening mouth. Two hours after saying that almost no one could understand why the Soham murders had become the biggest story in Britain, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, looks weary and irritable.

He escorts me away from the armchairs in his spartan office, which look like they do not get much use, and perches fretfully on a chair. “We’re reaching a point where it is going to be hard to be open,” he says, his hunched shoulders indicating disappointment with the press. “In a three-and-a-half hour meeting, this is the remark they focus on.”

The media storm was perhaps inevitable, given that the Oxford-educated, TV-friendly Sir Ian made the clumsy remark while accusing the press of institutional racism. Every police service, he says, depends on the media for information. “If the media only concentrate on middle-class or attractive people being killed, other lives lost of equal value will become more difficult to detect.”

He has since apologised for the remark about Soham but is unrepentant about alleging bias. “There is a group of people who do not want an articulate police officer. If the ‘street butler’ suddenly starts interrupting conversation at the dinner table, that’s apparently not acceptable.”

This is a man who likes to play the outsider, calling on the Establishment to wake up. He is also attacked as being too much the insider — too Blairite, too sensitive to his image. You sometimes feel he cannot win. On Wednesday he will have been in post for a year, a year that included the terrorist bombs on July 7 bombs; the attempt two weeks later; the shooting of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, mistaken for a suicide bomber; and the dispute over the detention of terror suspects.

Does the sniping get to Britain’s most senior police officer? “You’d be superhuman if it didn’t.” In the Dimbleby Lecture he gave in November — the first officer to do so for 30 years — Sir Ian talked about the need for change in a police service that had traditionally been separate and silent. He cited a 1970s study of the service called A Man Apart. Is that how he sees himself? “I don’t, in that sense. But I seem to be more interesting than I expected to be, if I can describe it that way.”

He starts to look a bit more twinkly. “The Met is beginning to overload the criminal justice system in London. We’re arresting so many more people, and sending so many more people penalty notices, that the courts, CPS and prisons are under strain.” He quotes a line from David Hare — quotes are a feature with Sir Ian, who read English at Christ Church — in which a judge tells a politician what a good thing it is that the police are inefficient:

“If they weren’t I don’t know what we’d do!” His spaniel eyes are crinkling up at the corners, his delight almost childish.

Wasn’t the system always overloaded? “There’s a change in tone. The number of ‘cracked trials’, trials not ready to proceed, is dropping. So prosecutors and the courts are beginning to get very stretched. And because of prison overcrowding the courts are under instruction to be very cautious before sending someone to prison on remand, so my officers are complaining about persistent burglars that are being bailed and then carrying out more offences. I ’m talking about people who are arrested for burglary while on bail for burglary.” A shrug of disappointment at another weak link in the Establishment.

What has happened to his promised crackdown on middle-class cocaine users? “That was in answer to Kirsty Wark, I think,” he says. It’s your fault if you go on all these programmes, I retort. “On your first day,” he says gently, “it’s quite difficult not to. All I said was is that there was an issue for people who use cocaine to understand the impact it has, and that there would be no hiding place, no exemption, for recreational users. We have had some very interesting results involving celebrity and other wealthy people’s suppliers. And it’s been great.”

“The Vice-President of Colombia said to me, ‘I’ve never taken cocaine but it’s tried to kill me three times.’ Do you know that the greatest deployment of landmines in the world is by the cocaine growers in Colombia, the greatest single deforestation is the drug barons in Colombia? People need to think that young men die in estates in North London so that someone else can have a wrap of cocaine.”

So where’s the crackdown, then? Why aren’t middle-class users cringing in fear? “I can’t imagine the circumstance in which the men of the Yard are crashing through the door of a Hampstead dinner party. But what we are doing is trying to make people understand that when they buy from a supplier — this has happened to some interesting people recently who are currently awaiting trial — when they buy from a supplier they find they’re buying from a Metropolitan Police officer. And that is quite an upsetting experience, I understand.” An impish smile. Are these people we would have heard of? “No, they’re not celebrities. But they’re not people who’d be buying from a street dealer in Brixton.”

He laughs, then he gets serious again. Referring to the sentencing this week of those who kicked and beat David Morley to death, he said: “The girl in the case was wandering the streets at 3, her father wasn’t around, her mother was a crack addict — that’s it.”

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