Interview in Sunday Times on 6 February 2005: Jasper Gerard meets Sir Ian Blair

Even Tony isn’t as Blairite as Sir Ian Blair. Britain’s most powerful policeman doubts that he is related to the prime minister (“it’s a common name in Edinburgh”) yet their political bloodline looks a similar shade of pinky red.
Fears that the Metropolitan police commissioner was a new Labour placeman arose on his first day last week: in the morning he said ministers should change the law so that householders could do anything to burglars that was not “grossly disproportionate”; by the afternoon he insisted that the existing law was hunky dory.

Blair, 51, is considered a fair cop. Other plods have even called the Oxford graduate an intellectual (a double-edged compliment in police circles). He is certainly the first copper I have met who has a Miro on his office wall, who ascribes to Al-Qaeda “a late 19th-century nihilism” or who once pondered an acting career in Hollywood.

Indeed, Blair’s attack on middle-class cocaine use smacked of one who knew the milieu. He decided to tackle the issue after a black female merchant banker asked him why police arrested blacks for possession in south London yet left her colleagues in City bars to carry on. Blair’s strategy, disclosed to The Sunday Times, sounds suspiciously like entrapment: to make officers pose as pushers and then arrest those who attempt to buy the drugs.

He bristles with activity: he is pushing Charles Clarke for up to 6,000 new recruits (insisting that only Denmark in the European Union has fewer police officers per capita than Britain) and says the home secretary seems agreeable. He also says the “slowness” of the asylum system might keep terrorists “trapped” in the country, although the greater threat comes from homegrown Muslims. He will lobby ministers to make evidence gained through telephone tapping admissible in court.

On the home secretary’s plan to keep suspected (but unconvicted) terrorists under house arrest, he warns against the arbitrary use of power: “We want to avoid the midnight knock on the door. We need transparency, not of intelligence but of the decision-making process, including rights of appeal, so the process is on public record. One of the solutions might be a judicial oversight.” This is a compromise that Clarke had rejected.

The problem with Blairism is that robust liberalism collapses into political correctness; Blair is the ultimate PC PC. He even says, amazingly: “There is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist. The question is how we help the vulnerable young who are attracted to violence.”

Try telling the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, that there is nothing wrong with fundamentalism: “There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him.” So that’s okay? “Just wait,” he says sharply. “Look at Jerry Springer — the Opera. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9% of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help. Bridges will be built.”

We have learnt that being too lenient can turn yobs into serious criminals, so might not extremist Muslims graduate into terrorists? “The people the anti-terrorist squad are after are murderers, it is not about breaking windows.”

How far would he appease fundamentalists, such as the Sikhs who forced a play off stage in Birmingham? “I am not saying it was appropriate to take that play off. But let us not blur the difference between protest and terrorism.”

We move on to drugs: “People think the price of a wrap of cocaine is 50 quid, but the cost is misery on estates here and a trail of blood back to Colombia. Someone has died to bring it to the dinner party. People who wouldn’t dream of having non-organic vegetables don’t notice the blood on their fingers.”

What will he do? “We are not going to burst through doors in Islington, but I do want to make people concerned that they might be buying drugs from a police officer. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” What about legalisation? “Until it is agreed there is a better way, it is my job to pick up the pieces.”

In the aromatic atmosphere of Oxford, was he more tolerant? “What you think at 19 is very different. Frankly, I don’t think it’s helpful to explore.” I will judge that: tape running, questioning of suspect begins — did you inhale or not? “I’m not going to go within a million miles of that.”

Were his contemporaries surprised by his career choice? “Yes, I think so. Almost from when I could walk I was going to be a doctor. At 14 I took agin this and quietly dropped biology O-level. I’m very glad. One week I was in strategic planning, the next heading a murder inquiry. I don’t think there is any other profession where you have to play out ethical dilemmas as in the police.”

He says he wants the police to be an exemplar of modernised public service. To old-timers who say that trendiness does not catch criminals, he says that the Met’s cultural and community resources unit enables police to call in, say, Somalian-born officers to a Somalian case. “Although,” he allows himself a smile, “we do have some trouble providing Inuits.”