Two years ago, Boris Johnson’s Policing Deputy declared that he and Boris had their “hands on the tiller” of the Metropolitan Police.
No longer would The Met be obsessed with managing media relations, he told the Guardian. No longer would they be obsessed with fighting headlines rather than fighting crime.
And yet on the very next day, another one of Boris’s Deputy Mayors was charged with five counts of fraud.
Unable to keep his own deputy mayor’s hands off the City Hall credit card, it is not surprising that Boris has also failed to get his hands around the far trickier problems at Scotland Yard.
Since then the Met has continued to blunder on from crisis to crisis, and since then Boris has actually loosened his shaky hold on the force.
Despite his election promise to exert greater power over the Met, Boris soon resigned his Chairmanship of the Metropolitan Police Authority, and handed it over to a man whose main crime-fighting concern so far has been to tell Londoners which breeds of dog they should own.
From the controversial policing of recent protests, to the abysmal investigation into phone hacking, Boris has never missed an opportunity to dismiss legitimate criticisms of the police, and to defend those that now look indefensible.
In the London Assembly and in his £250k Telegraph column, Boris described the phone hacking story as “a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party,” a “song and dance about nothing” and persuaded his readers that celebrities actually wanted their phones to be hacked.
Claims about phone hacking had, he told us, been “substantially investigated” and he was therefore “completely satisfied” that the Met had done a good job.
It is not clear whether Boris’s dismissals were simply the “extraordinary and unwise” actions of a partisan politicians or whether they were informed by darker memories of his own time as a journalist.
But what is now clear is that the Met actually did the worst of all possible jobs investigating criminal activities at the News of the World. And even now as the second police commissioner in three years steps down, Boris is still pretending that any problems are merely superficial and the fault of at most a handful of corrupt officers.
Now with Sir Paul Stephenson gone there is an opportunity for somebody to finally get a steady hand on the shaky tiller of the Metropolitan Police.
But whoever the Home Office finds to do the job, Boris Johnson is somebody whose tiller-holding advice they can clearly manage to do without.
Adam Bienkov is a journalist and blogger covering London Politics. He writes a regular column and blog for Snipe London Magazine.
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