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Does he understand the dissonance between the crime statistics he is so fond of and what people actually feel? “The Met has decided to launch a real sea-change in policing (establishing permanent teams in neighbourhoods) because we’re picking up from lots of people that they’re very frightened. There is another side to it, though. Who are the people who are frightened? People who previously had lives which were broadly exempt from crime are now finding crime coming to them.

“There are two reasons for that. One is that when we began to do proper analysis of where crime was in London, it was very concentrated in a small number of areas. One of the effects of our attack on crime is to spread it, though much more thinly. The second point is that there were a large number of people in the inner cities for whom crime was a daily event and for whom it is now not a daily event. They have seen a gigantic change in policing and have benefited from it. Recorded crime is going down.”

But, I bluster, feeling this sounds complacent. Don’t youths have less respect for the police than ever? “I don’t think so. If you’re not broadly against the police when you’re a teenager, you’re not much of a teenager. There are some young people out of control, and to some degree this is crime as always as a symptom of deeper underlying problems. The great choice for policing is how far upstream do you go before in fact you start to tread into other people’s territory.”

His big idea is community policing: placing small teams of police and community support officers in one area and keeping them there. “Next year the Met will launch the biggest development of community policing ever in its history: 3,500 people, a force bigger than the Thames Valley.” There are already 250 community teams that have “done 7,000 arrests in the last six months, that's a fairly dramatic change”.

But community support officers don’t have powers of arrest, do they? Can they detain someone until the copper arrives? “The important point is that 95 per cent of those who are causing the trouble live in the area. There was a bit on TV yesterday when a young man who refused to stop, he drove off; but the cop just said it’s George. Next time we see him, we’ll get him. We also have 120 officers full-time in schools . . . we’re getting reports of crime from schoolchildren who now think we’re a good thing.”

Home Office figures that came out after this interview suggested that community support officers had had no impact on curbing crime, although they had reassured the public. That must be a blow, not least because the community programme may ultimately have more influence over his career than terrorism. Yet the increase in reassurance is quite dramatic: half of those asked said that they felt safe in those neighbourhoods in 2001; 62 per cent say they feel safe now.

Sir Ian’s belief in basing police permanently in an area instead of moving them around has got to make sense, as has his desire to use more civilians. Productivity would surely rise if civilians could be substituted for officers in roles such as serving prisoner meals. Here his frustration is palpable.

“There is a political machismo around officer numbers. Every party says their manifesto commitment is to produce more officers rather than to improve satisfaction, or lower crime. We don’t judge hospitals by the number of doctors or nurses, so why do we judge policing by the number of police officers?” We come to July 7. His son was in London that day.

“I was lucky because he rang me to say he couldn’t get on the Tube and he was round the corner and I said, ‘Get here’.” He smiles. “I then got one of the more important calls of my life — my wife saying, ‘My God, where is he?’ I said, ‘He’s here’, so she was rather relieved. He sat in one of the offices here and made coffee for people.” Did he consider resigning over de Menezes? “In the middle of the media storm, when you wake up and listen to two people you’ve never met discussing whether you should be fired, sacked, hanged or whatever, if you don’t reflect on it you’re bonkers. But no, I don’t think that [now]. When the final report comes out it can’t be a good story.

“But I think the Met did three things well,” he says: it prevented a considerable number of conspiracies, it co-ordinated emergency services on July 7 and it arrested suspects after the July 21 attempts. “We never expected the idea of suicide bombers on the run, because it’s never happened anywhere in the world. But when the report comes out, we will have to reflect on that.”

I ask about 24-hour drinking. “What’s the name of the police officer in Les Misérables?” he asks his press officer, who looks as though she has decided not to keep a file on all his literary allusions. Undeterred, he continues. “Every time I do an interview like this I begin to feel that there’s a kind of copper’s moral guardian, and I don't want to be that.” So there is a limit to the man’s ambition — that’ s the first thing he’s said that he doesn’t want to do. I refrain from asking why he sees fit to moralise about press racism, but not alcoholism, and merely reflect silently that he should do self-deprecation more often: it suits him.

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