Dare the government take on the boys in blue?

There was once an old political saying – variously attributed to both Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan – that neatly defined the limits of state power in the middle part of the 20th century.

"There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards, and the National Union of Mineworkers," it went.

Times change, of course, and a modern rendition would undoubtedly have different bogeymen in the guise of those with whom no government dare fall out.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch, as we saw in last week's column, would certainly be one. The all-powerful motoring lobby might be another. But if you had to pick a third, it would probably be the Police Federation.

Attempts to reform the police over recent decades have invariably foundered as soon as the Federation – as influential a trade union as the NUM once was – started flexing its muscles.

Three years ago, the then Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith tried to shelve a police pay increase that had been awarded by an independent assessor – and was swiftly forced to back down.

Fifteen years earlier, Ken Clarke – no softie he – had launched a much more wholesale attempt at reform.

When Clarke moved from the Home Office to the Treasury it landed in his successor Michael Howard's inbox - but even that legendary political hardman decided a scrap with the boys in blue was not worth the candle.

So it is not without political significance that this week has seen the publication of a brace of reports which taken together amount to something of a double whammy for police pay and conditions.

On Tuesday, former rail regulator Tom Winsor published the results of a review calling for the abolition of overtime payments worth up to £4,000 a year to officers.

The following day, Lord Hutton – that's former Barrow MP John Hutton rather than Tony Blair's favourite retired judge – published a much more wide-ranging review into public sector pensions.

Among other things, it recommended not only the end of final salary pension schemes in the public sector, but an increase in the retirement age which would see police, members of the armed forces and firemen working till they were 60.

Already, the public sector unions – including the Federation - have made clear that the government has a big fight on its hands if it tries to implement this week's proposals.

As Unison's Dave Prentice put it: "This will be just one more attack on innocent public sector workers who are being expected to pay the price of the deficit, while the bankers who caused it continue to enjoy bumper pay and bonuses."

There are certain to be demonstrations, possibly even strikes, which will put the Police Federation in an interesting position to say the least.

For of course its members will be expected to control the protests called by those campaigning against the very proposals which they and their colleagues are being threatened with.

In one sense, this is a reform whose time has come. Final salary pension schemes are a thing of the past across most of the private sector, and in that context the retirement benefits enjoyed by public sector staff have started to look more and more anachronistic.

Yet the country's six million public sector workers remain a big and powerful constituency for any government to take on, especially in the aftermath of a recession.

Ultimately it may come down to a rather crude consideration, namely how many votes there are in public sector pension reform.

The answer is: probably not many. But there are a great many more potentially lost ones.

Wishful thinking

A warm welcome back to Slob....

Ever the buffoon

It is of course right that Sir Ian Blair is to stand down as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. He arguably should have done so in July 2005 as soon as it became clear that his force had fired seven bullets into the head of an innocent man and that he had given a misleading account of the circumstances surrounding it. He should certainly have done so last November when the force was found guilty of health and safety offences in relation to the said shooting.

But the circumstances of Sir Ian's resignation yesterday - effectively sacked by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson on his first day as chairman of the police authority - raises issues not just about Sir Ian's fitness for the job of Commissioner, but also about Mr Johnson's fitness for the job of Mayor.

As the increasingly impressive Jacqui Smith pointed out in a Question Time performance of cool, controlled anger, there is a clear procedure in place for the removal of a Commissioner involving the police authority - not just its chairman - making a recommendation to that effect to the Home Secretary.

By failing to follow this procedure, and behaving instead like a tinpot dictator, Mr Johnson has not only managed the considerable feat of inducing sympathy for Sir Ian Blair, he has demonstrated once again his deep and ineradicable buffoonery.

What does it take to get someone to resign?

Politicians and other people in positions in authority used to resign on a point of principle if bad things happened on their watch, but as Peter Oborne pointed out in his recent book on the Political Class, times have changed somewhat and the name of the game these days is to hang on to your job for as long as possible, if necessary by blaming the media for trying to force you out.

In view of the obvious topicality of this, I have devised a league table which lists, in ascending order of pigheaded obstinacy, ten political figures who have either resigned or come under pressure to resign in recent years.

1. Estelle Morris. Decided she wasn't up to the job after a few mildly critical media reports about exam results. Pusillanimous rather than pig-headed.

2. Michael Howard. Quit the day after a general election in which many observers thought his party, despite its defeat, had done well enough to enable him to stay on.

3. Sir Menzies Campbell. Rather impulsively fell on his sword after seven days of consecutive press reports about his age, 48 hours after telling reporters he had no intention of going.

4. Stephen Byers. Initially survived both the Jo Moore affair and claims that he lied over Railtrack, but eventually quit realising that his department was indeed "fucked" as long as he stayed.

5. Peter Mandelson. Thought he could ride out the Geoffrey Robinson home loan affair and actually prepared a media "fightback" strategy. Tony Blair other ideas and told him to bite the bullet.

6. Beverley Hughes. Tried to stay in her job despite visa scam involving work permits for one-legged Romanian roofers. Eventually had to go after it emerged she had been warned about the problem.

7. David Blunkett. Forced to quit over a rushed visa for his mistress's nanny, days after a defiant rendition at the Labour MPs' Christmas bash of "pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again."

8. Mark Oaten. Stood for the leadership of his party in full knowledge of the fact that his, er, personal difficulties were likely to prove something of a liability if they ever came to light. Eventually saw sense and quit.

9. Tony Blair. Survived a disastrous military adventure and the suicide of the man who tried to blow the whistle on his government's lies before finally accepting that the public had fallen out of love with him.

10. Sir Ian Blair. Remains in his job despite his force being found guilty of health and safety offences over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, a vote of no confidence by the London Assembly, and resignation calls from across the political spectrum. Clearly, and by some margin, the most pig-headed man in Britain.

The arrogance of Sir Ian Blair

I learned fairly early on my journalistic career that getting senior police officers to take responsibility for their actions is no easy task. In the early 1980s, the then Chief Constable of Derbyshire, Alf Parrish, was allowed to retire on a full police pension despite having spent £32,000 of ratepayers' money building an electronic partition in his office which slid back to reveal a space for private cocktail parties.

In another episode, about which I would love to be able to say more, a deputy chief constable's administrative error resulted in police officers being paid so much overtime it practically bankrupted the force concerned. Once again, despite attempts by the local police authority to bring him to account, the man concerned was allowed to retire on a full pension, and his misdemeanours were never actually made public.

So it doesn't greatly surprise me that Sir Ian Blair clearly views the de Menezes case less as a question about whether anyone should be seen to take responsibility for the tragic death of an innocent man and the systemic failures in the Metropolitan Police which led to it, and more about the much more important issue of principle of whether he should be allowed to keep his job.

It's frankly beyond belief that he hasn't quit already, but he is clearly not on the same planet as most of the rest of us. It's almost as if he sees the case as just part of a much bigger battle between the forces of conservatism and the forces of liberalism, a battle in which he sees himself as being on the side of the angels.

If so, it explains why all of the support for Sir Ian remaining in his job is coming from the political left. While the right and centre are at one in their calls for him to go, the Labour establishment, from Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to London Mayor Ken Livingstone, is adamant he should not.

I am as convinced as I can be that this is less down to the merits of the case and more down to tribal loyalties. Sir Ian is seen as "Labour's man," and more generally as a force for "modernisation" and "reform" in a force that, not so long ago, was found to be institutionally racist. Therefore he must not be allowed to be forced out by those nasty reactionary elements.

To base one's view on the internal political ramifications for the Met, however, or even on the ramifications for policing in London, is to lose sight of a much more important issue of principle - the fact that restoring trust in public life requires that those at the top start taking responsiblity for their actions.

Sir Ian Blair's removal - and in my view it's a matter of when, not if - may well result in him being replaced by a more conservative figure - a "copper's copper" as they are known in the shorthand. But if that helps restore a culture of accountability to our public life, it will ultimately be a larger victory for the liberal-left.

An edited version of this post appears on Liberal Conspiracy.

Blair must go

Peter Oborne explained in his recent book that one of the defining characteristics of the "political class" was the belief that their continuance in office is more important than any quaint notions of accountability for organisational failure. We saw it with Tony Blair when he refused to resign in the wake of the Butler Inquiry despite its devastating finding that intelligence on Iraqi WMD was distorted, and now we're seeing it with his namesake Sir Ian Blair over the equally damning de Menezes verdict.

David Davis, Nick Clegg and Iain Dale are right. He should go. Am I the only person who finds it both surprising and depressing that it is a Labour Government that should be seeking to defend him?