Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 2 June 2010.
A fascinating insight in to, what must be, one of the toughest and most stressful jobs in the country. Iain Blair had only been the Commissioner of the Met for four months when the London July bombings happened so found himself in the thick of things from the word go.
The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is often described as the toughest job in the world. He (there has never been a woman in 140 years) is answerable to three bosses, the Mayor of London, the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Authority, and he has a GBP3 billion budget to spend, ensuring that he is always at the centre of a political storm, and never out of the news. But more than that, he has to battle with traffic deaths and burglary, knife crime, gun crime, and the really big stuff, like terrorism - wherever it happens in the UK. Ian Blair had been top cop for just four months when the tube and bus bombs of 7 July 2005 hit London in the worst terrorist atrocity in British history. And when 4 suicide bombers tried to kill hundreds more people on 21 July, it was on his beat. So it was the next day when, infamously, the unarmed and innocent Jean de Menezes was shot at Stockwell. Here for the first time is the fly-on-the-wall story of an impossible job; of the background and history of the police and their difficult relationship with us, the public; of the de Menezes case; of fighting terrorism - everywhere in Britain, in cases that never reach the media; of the battle with politicians, and of Blair's forced resignation by Boris Johnson.
Sir Ian Blair was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for four years from 2005-2008. He was a career policeman, who worked his way up through the ranks from Constable to the very top. He lives in Oxford. Policing Controversy is his first book.
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