The Metropolitan Police is an august British Institution. The first organised and duly constituted police force in the world, the Met has a sterling reputation in Britain, and around the world, for fairness and effectiveness, and its officers are the only police force in the world to do their duties unarmed as a matter of course (although there are, however, armed officers on standby to deal with events that require armed force). Ian Blair is the Chief commissioner for the Metropolitan Police and is the leader of an organisation that has been unfortunately caught out behaving in a way that belies its history and reputation, particularly its reputation amongst the people of London. This is because he was the head of the police when Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician, was gunned down in cold blood in a train at Stockwell tube station after being mistaken for an Islamist terrorist being surveilled by the police at that time. This would have been tragic, but unremarkable, if that was all there was to it, or if he could simply be categorised as an unfortunate statistic and collateral damage of the war on terror, but as the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s Stockwell-1 report and a court of law have since ruled there were at least 19 critical mistakes made in the execution of processes within the operation and these were not one-offs but were indicative of the organisation of the police process management for an operation of this sort and revealed systemic deficiencies with the Met that Mr Blair should have had a handle on. Mr Blair was in charge at the time and should tender his resignation immediately.

Now some have said that since the Commissioner didn’t know about these operational failings until afterwards, and didn’t personally have operational control, he should be let off. Others have said since he has been through the entire process that he has knows the issues that need to be resolved and has the insider know-how to do this. Both are not only disingenuous, but are worrying signs of muddled thinking, particularly when articulated by people such as the Home Secretary and the Mayo of London. If the security during a period of enhanced terror threat is that important to Londoners and the people they’ve chosen to lead them then he needs to go immediately! Here’s why…

1. Management Failure: In the past week or so I’ve just watched the heads of Citibank, Merril Lynch and UBS resign. The reason they went was that underlings had made decisions to buy certain classes of AAA rated investment vehicles that seemed to offer stellar returns without any visibly exceptional risk. When this turned out not to be true these huge financial services companies lost a lot of money. One, Citibank, was still hugely profitable but not as much as it would have been otherwise. Its head didn’t make the decision where to invest, and didn’t even have direct control of the investment process (like all good managers he had delegated this to others) but he, like the others, set the agenda and took responsibility for it and his delegatory decisions and when they went wrong he had to go. Never mind how well he had done for so many years up until then, that was then, this is now and his responsibility is for the results today. This is how it works in very well run organisations. If the Met has pretences to be “amongst the best” then the way forward is clear - find someone of that calibre to lead it! Ian Blair isn’t up to the task.

The boss is in charge; he or she is responsible, whether they are a business leader, a government minister, or the head of a charity. The organisational head is the one responsible and the one that carries the can when things go wrong, especially when they go disastrously wrong. In the case of the big businesses the shareholders, in spite of superb returns for years, didn’t have the confidence that the bosses had a grip on things today. In the same way, although he had only been in the job 5 months, Ian Blair had had plenty of time to stamp his authority on the organisation wracked by previous scandal. The first thing a manager does when accepting a new post is to look at the process management and changing things to make changing the culture easier. Well, good leaders in well run organisations do that…

For Ian Blair to have been misled by his command teams with regards to the whole de Menezes affair to the point that he had briefed the press incorrectly for at least 24 hours says that he had not only failed to stamp his authority, but was actively being suborned by those who were supposed to have been working for him. This is either incompetence on a gross scale, or it’s enemy action. I prefer to accept the former as more plausible. Clearly though he was not in charge and and is tainted goods and must go.

But it goes beyond that! The Stockwell-1 report presented a litany of failure, not of personnel errors (although these were aplenty), but of broken systems that were certain to fail, particularly under the pressure of a fast-moving anti-terror operation such as the one that claimed Mr de Menezes’ life. John Lettice of The Register details the operational infrastructure and systems problems that seemed almost to conspire to claim someone’s life in such a situation. It fell to Mr de Menezes to draw the short straw but it appears this was a catastrophe bound to happen at some point giving the lie to the mayor’s and Home Secretary’s statements about a one-off mistake. The gunfire in Stockwell Tube was “the sound of inevitability.” In this case, for Ian Blair to want to stay on to fix the system seems a cruel joke. Why didn’t he at least start to fix it before? And never mind that, why didn’t he even know of the systemic problems before? If he did, why did he persist in briefing the press wrongly knowing there was a significant probability that he might be giving out false information? Either he was ignorant, or was callously lying to provide a cover for an operation that had gone terribly wrong and would reflect badly on the Met (and, hence, his leadership of it). Given the obstacles the IPCC had in getting to the bottom of the whole affair, it’s a fair toss-up as to which is the correct answer but neither point to the profile of the man who will inspire confidence leading the Metropolitan Police!

2. The Management of the Government Monopoly on Violence: As Mussolini so aptly pointed out, government controls the monopoly on legitimated violence. Political debate on the nature of comparative politics and civic government aside, the Metropolitan Police has been invested by the Her Majesty’s government with the ability and right to officially, and in the name of the Crown, project force and violence up to, and including causing death, to achieve legitimate and official aims in maintaining law and order in London. Because of this it’s imperative that the populace has faith and confidence that the police will exercise this only in legitimate circumstances subject to the strictest procedural criteria, and rigorous managerial surety of operational execution of this gravely important duty. As detailed above and elsewhere, this was sorely lacking in the operation that took Mr de Menezes’ life and the public at the moment doesn’t have the confidence and won’t as long as this man leads the Met.

The fact that, as some have said, this had never happened before is irrelevant. As detailed above it was inevitable given state of the decrepit systems and the infrastructure it relied upon. Others have said that the Met was under considerable pressure but this is also not the point. These are mere training issues and, again process management issues in this case, and ones that had not been addressed even though there was much more than sufficient warning of the terrorist threat. Additionally it’s times like these that the Met has to perform at its best and if it isn’t capable of doing so, then a new regime must be brought in starting with someone else to be in charge of implementing and leading it. The fact that, had Mr de Menezes actually been a suicide bomber, all of this would have been perceived differently misses the point in a spectacular way, and is really nothing more than a coy distraction from the real issue! The problems were there regardless of whether the Met got a terrorist or not. It appears that it was inevitable that someone would be killed in such an operation at some point thus doesn’t excuse the problems away. The problems inside the Met would still have had to be dealt with but there is no reason to believe Ian Blair would have as it doesn’t appear he had a grip on them to begin with.

3. The Moral Argument: Leadership requires the leader take the responsibility for the failings of the organisation. All the big business leaders above lost their jobs because some companies lost some money for shareholders but because they understood the responsibility that had been invested in them they resigned. Government ministers resign when some great huge cock-up they hadn’t been aware of, prepared for or (sometimes more importantly) briefed unwisely blows up publicly. But human lives are worth so much more and are so much more important. For Ian Blair not to go when the Met had so carelessly killed someone in cold blood by a litany of managerial incompetence (allowing systemic failings on this scale) says the he apparently doesn’t actually take human lives that seriously and that bankers run their businesses to a much higher ethical standard than the Met. For an institution invested with the dread powers the Met has, and subject to alleged democratic oversight it seems it would behove it to look to achieve a rather higher standard than it operates under at the moment. At least in this respect Ian Blair could show a late bout of admirable leadership by tendering his resignation to the Home Secretary immediately. He needs to go, and he needs to go now. Whether he jumps, or is pushed, is, at this point, frankly immaterial.