UNDERCOVER Scotland Yard officers are operating as drug suppliers to catch middle-class cocaine users, Britain’s top police officer reveals today.

In a move to honour his pledge to disrupt cocaine taking at middle-class dinner parties, the Yard has adopted “sting operations” to trap people. Senior officers believe that middle-class users are rarely suspicious of an undercover officer supplying them if they look as well heeled as they do.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, discloses the covert operations in an interview with The Times as he was forced to apologise unreservedly yesterday for saying that “almost nobody” could understand why the Soham murders became the biggest story in Britain.

After some furious criticism, he apologised directly to the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman but insisted that his comments about the way race, age and gender played a part in determining which murders were covered by the press were “genuinely true”.

In the interview, Sir Ian says that many of the sting operations to catch middle-class cocaine users were mounted in bars and clubs and monitored by hidden cameras.

He adds: “What we are doing is trying to make people understand that when they buy from a supplier ... they find they are buying from a Metropolitan Police officer. And that is quite an upsetting experience, I understand.”

On taking up his job a year ago, Sir Ian promised to make examples of a few people for whom it had become socially acceptable at dinner parties to drink less wine and take more cocaine. A team of senior officers was ordered to develop a strategy to turn his promise into action.

Sir Ian says in his interview that the undercover tactics used by his officers have already proved a success. He said the people were not celebrities but neither were they the type who would be purchasing cocaine from “a street dealer in Brixton”. The strategy developed by Scotland Yard’s covert operations unit is a refinement of the tactic of test purchasing, in which police pose as buyers and then arrest dealers when they hand over the drugs. Police now replace the dealers they arrest with undercover officers, equipped with hidden microphones.

Sir Ian said that he wanted middle-class users of cocaine, a Class A drug that carries a maximum seven-year prison sentence for possession, to recognise the impact that their habit had elsewhere.

“People need to think that young men died in estates in North London so that someone else can have a wrap of cocaine,” he said. However, guests taking cocaine at the dinner table in fashionable circles of London can rest assured that they will not be interrupted by the police. Sir Ian said: “I can’t imagine the circumstance in which the men of the Yard are crashing through the door of a Hampstead dinner party.”

However, latest government figures suggest that police are adopting a “softly, softly” approach to the recreational taking of cocaine and not prosecuting users. The number of cocaine possession crimes in which offenders were handed only a caution has almost quadrupled. In 2004 almost four out of ten cocaine possession cases in England and Wales resulted in the offender being given a caution and having the drug confiscated, compared with 11 per cent three years ago.

The Government’s strategy is for police to focus on Class A drugs, which they say are likely to cause the most harm.

Sir Ian also gives warning that the criminal justice system in London is overloaded because of the sheer number of alleged suspects being caught.

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