Regular readers will know already exactly what I think about former Met boss Sir Ian Blair. As you can imagine, I’m happy as Larry he’s finally gone and this morning I was going to look at the cross-party politics that laid behind his figleaf of a ‘resignation’.
But I see that Rory Baxter of civil service blog Public Servant Daily has saved me the trouble:
We didn’t want Blair to go, Smith said. Oh please …
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What was the government going to do, this guy had accusation after accusation being thrown at him and he was refusing to go, holding press conferences to say “I deny everything, I just want to get on with my job”? Sacking him was out of the question, how would that look? So the problem would not go away and, with Blair insisting he wanted to stay in post for the 2012 Olympics, Blair’s sores could well be running right across a general election, putting the Home Secretary – and therefore the government – in a very difficult position. You don’t want this kind of scandal hanging around at election time. No, Blair had to go beforehand, that was certain. But how?
Along comes Boris Johnson and hands the answer to Smith – and Blair, it has to be said – on a plate. Johnson had already made noises about wiping the slate clean at the Met when he gained power and Home Office officials had talked at the time of how Smith would almost certainly not oppose such a move. According to one report, when asked some time ago if Smith still had full confidence in Blair, a senior Whitehall official said: “No one is indispensable.” Funny how she now feigns disappointment and surprise.
Exactly. He had to go before the Jean-Charles De Menezes inquest lays bare any more of his and New Labour’s policing and policy fuckups. Blair was New Labour’s creature; they made him, they ran him, and now they need to get rid of him. Boris is happy to go along because it makes him and his party look good. ‘Who will rid us of this troublesome plod?’ said No. 10: ‘Me!’ said Boris “More tv face time! Huzzah!’
This is a rare outbreak of bipartisanship dressed up as an interparty spat. Ian Blair walks away without the opprobrium of a sacking, with his retirement benefits intact, a nifty knighthood, and a future pension-enhancing career in daytime tv; Boris looks like a decisive leader, Labour gets rid of a liability, the public gets revenge of a sort. Everybody wins.
Actually, thinking about it, Labour gets rid of two liabilities; Blair and Jacqui Smith, who has been an embarassing failure as Home Secretary and who’s alternately alienated rank and file coppers and sucked up to the grandest, most expensive paramilitary anti-‘terror’ fantasies of a few wannabe J. Edgars in the senior ranks.
Her worst moment came when in January she admitted in a newspaper interview that she felt unsafe walking alone in London at night, at the same time as bragging about the success of her neighborhood policing team strategy and her 5 million pound anti-knife crime initiative. This was not helped when one of her few female colleagues in the cabinet, Harriet Harman visited her constituency wearing a stab vest and cowering between a praetorian guard of those very neighbourhood police officers. Very reassuring.
It would be too embarassing to sack her outright, there’s few enough women in the cabinet as it is, and Harriet Harman might kick up a stink. No what Brown (or should I say Mandy, now they’re ‘joined at the hip’?) has done is to install Margaret Beckett so the sexism jibe is neutralised.
So let her take a public humiliation in the Blair affair, then a couple of months later give her her reward – a peerage, a pension and a kick upstairs, and hey presto, the way’s open to bring back yet another Blairite to push ID cards and Titan prisons through against public resistance. My money’s on Blunkett.
Gordon Brown has stepped in personally to block Sir Ian Blair from receiving a peerage when he steps down as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, The Independent on Sunday has learned.
Sources said yesterday that allowing Sir Ian a seat in the House of Lords would fuel controversy over his resignation, and the Prime Minister would prefer to distance the Government from the row surrounding it.
If the outgoing police chief is denied a peerage, he will be the first retiring head of Scotland Yard not to get one in almost two decades. It had been expected that Sir Ian would be given a peerage within months of stepping down. But a Downing Street source said yesterday that had been ruled out.
I think that proves Public Servant Daily’s point.
