If you’re trying to find New Labour’s deepest flaw, just ask a policeman

In his Dimbleby Lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, declared that ‘policing is becoming not only central to our understanding of citizenship, it is becoming a contestable political issue as never before’. He called for ‘open thought’ and an ‘open debate’. He said it was time for the police service to transform itself into ‘one holistic service’.

In most police canteens they probably think that ‘holistic’ is a kind of glue. But Sir Ian is, if nothing else, a very unusual copper. He has the troubled countenance of a regional manager for Kwik-Fit Euro who is failing to make his targets and dreads every call from head office. Yet he speaks like a sociologist: more Howard Kirk from The History Man than Dixon of Dock Green.

Well, Sir Ian might say, so what? Where does it say that Knacker is only allowed to read the Riot Act, and can’t dip into a little Durkheim or Gramsci? And the Met Commissioner would be right, I suppose. The trouble, in his own case, is that intellect has proved no substitute for guile and political dexterity. In 13 months he has fumbled, he has stumbled and — in the end — he has been nabbed secretly taping telephone conversations, including at least one with the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith. So much for ‘open debate’.

The full extent of Sir Ian’s errors will not be clear until the Independent Police Complaints Commission delivers its report on his handling of the aftermath of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes last July. What we do know already, however, is something of the Commissioner’s state of mind in recent months. And one must ask why so senior a public servant felt constrained to make private recordings of this sort. The claim that Sir Ian did not have an official note-taker with him may be accurate, but does not have the ring of psychological truth.