Ian Blair, Lord Blair of Boughton, who has died aged 72, was the Metropolitan police commissioner who not only faced unprecedented terrorist attacks on London during his tenure, but was the first for more than 100 years to be sacked by the politician to whom he was responsible, Boris Johnson as mayor of London, in 2008.
Casting a very dark shadow over his leadership was the handling of the shooting of the innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes by police marksmen at Stockwell tube station in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist attacks five months into Blair’s appointment as commissioner in 2005.
He was slow to acknowledge that the police had made a terrible mistake, failed seemingly to appreciate the severity of the error and tried to prevent the Independent Police Complaints Commission from investigating what had happened. London and its police force were under tremendous pressure at the time, but the incident was devastating to his career and reputation.
Blair, an Oxford-educated graduate in English literature – another first for the role - notably attempted to reform the procedures of the Met and to make it more responsive to the capital’s diverse communities. But he failed to master public relations – and lost any credit he might have had both with the rightwing media and its Conservative political allies and, more crucially, with many of the officers under his command.
He was, they called him, “the PC PC”, too close to the government of his unrelated namesake Tony Blair and prone to buckle in a crisis. In the words of the former policeman and commentator Tony Judge to the Guardian in 2006: “He doesn’t seem to be a leader, seems to be very much a theorist … seen as an academic police officer first and foremost, a product of the leadership cadre that has emerged over the last 30 years.” There was ingrained suspicion of a fast-tracked graduate in a traditionally non-graduate profession.
Blair was the younger son of Sheila (nee Law) and Francis Blair, who worked for Lever Brothers, latterly as the dock manager at Port Sunlight. Ian and his older brother, Sandy, were brought up in Boughton, a suburb of Chester, and both were privately educated – in Ian’s case at Wrekin college – with their fees paid by an uncle who was a doctor. Ian then studied English at Christ Church, Oxford, having ambitions to be an actor, though his family hoped he might become a doctor. Acting did not come off, but the university careers service was successful, to his family’s disappointment, in suggesting he might try the police instead.
Joining the Met in 1974, he was fast-tracked on the new police graduate entry scheme, rising rapidly up the ranks: detective sergeant at Notting Hill, chief inspector at Kentish Town and a period on the staff of the chief inspector of constabulary, investigating the police themselves.
These were not deskbound jobs: he was involved in policing the Brixton riots and placed in charge of identifying the victims of the King’s Cross fire in 1987. He was sent on the senior commanders’ course at Bramshill police training college and in 1982 given a bursary to study rape case procedures in the US, subsequently producing a book, Investigating Rape (1985), which would inform his attitude to the treatment of the crime and its victims.
In 1993 he was made head of the Met’s complaints investigation bureau and placed in charge of the Operation Gallery inquiry into police corruption. He became assistant chief constable of the Thames Valley force, in charge of policing the protests against the construction of the Newbury bypass, and in 1998 was made chief constable of Surrey. Two years later he was back at the Met, as deputy to the commissioner, John Stevens, the coppers’ copper, a dominating and popular presence in the force. Blair, supposedly supplying the intellect to accompany Stevens’s avuncular authority, was clearly earmarked as his successor. In 2003 he was knighted.
The Met was still recovering from accusations of institutional racism levelled at it in the Macpherson report into the investigation of the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and Blair introduced initiatives intended to root out the so-called canteen culture, not only of racism but also misogyny and homophobia within the force.
These appealed to the Blair government in appointing him as commissioner to the traditional five-year term in 2005, but also inevitably led to resentment and antagonism among some officers. The force’s unofficial magazine Constabulary claimed “PC has gone way beyond reasonable and fair,” and the fact that Blair was seen as too close to New Labour inevitably aroused the ire of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.
Both would pursue him relentlessly. It did not help that Blair, assured and often genial to members of the public and in broadcast interviews, could be seen as chilly and remote within the force. He told the Guardian in 2005: “I am never going to be the Daily Mail’s cup of tea. I can’t work the Telegraph out: the things we are doing are what the Telegraph would like us to do, but they still don’t like it.”
Measures such as diverting £300m to frontline policing, being more responsive to London’s residents, the setting up of 600 safer neighbourhoods local teams of officers, the streamlining of the Met’s labyrinthine and sometimes rival operational teams and the codifying of the force’s values cut little ice with the critics. Nor did falling crime and murder rates and the recruitment of an increasing number of people from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Then came 7/7: the detonation on 7 July 2005 of Islamist terrorist bombs on three rush-hour tube trains at Russell Square, Aldgate and Edgware Road, and on a bus at Tavistock Square, which together killed 52 people and injured 800. With the capital on full alert and its population fearful, Blair went directly not to the scenes – he would do that later – but to the television studios to offer reassurance. “I was just instinctively aware that what we needed now was a man in uniform to say we’re OK,” he said. “I don’t want to be at all boastful, but I just thought it was the right moment.”
This demonstrativeness came back to haunt him a fortnight later. De Menezes, innocently on his way to work, was shot dead at Stockwell station by armed officers who mistakenly believed that he was one of the missing terrorists. Blair, against the advice of senior colleagues, gave a highly misleading press conference later that day indicating that the killing was justified because De Menezes had refused to stop or obey police instructions, even as it was becoming clear that the police narrative was both self-serving and wrong. De Menezes had not refused anything, had not tried to escape, had not been carrying a concealed bomb and had already been restrained when he was shot.
Blair was slow to acknowledge the mistakes the following day and even downplayed the incident later, telling the Guardian that it had been “a paragraph in a novel moving at high speed. It’s awful we shot somebody. It’s awful he was completely innocent.”
It emerged that he had tried to prevent the IPCC carrying out its duty to investigate the shooting. He survived the fallout and subsequent investigations, but his reputation did not recover and he became increasingly gaffe-prone, as when he appeared to downplay the seriousness of the murder of two girls in Soham, saying their case did not merit such widespread media attention as it was getting.
Blair by now was alienating not just Conservative media and politicians – he was the first commissioner whose work was overseen by the mayor of London and the capital’s police authority rather than the home secretary – but also senior officers in the Met who were increasingly critical of his leadership.
In October 2008, Johnson, the new mayor, announced that he could not work with Blair and forced him into resignation, the first commissioner not to serve out his full term since 1890.
Blair, who was created a life peer in 2010, retired to write his memoirs, Policing Controversy (2009), and to serve on various charitable bodies. He was a trustee of the Globe theatre, and chair of trustees at the children’s hospice Helen & Douglas house in Oxford, and of the Woolf Institute, an interfaith charity in Cambridge. He was active on the commission for assisted dying (2010-12) and made notable contributions on this subject in the House of Lords.
He married Felicity White in 1980. She, a son, Josh, and a daughter, Amelia, survive him.
• Ian Warwick Blair, Lord Blair of Boughton, police officer, born 19 March 1953; died 9 July 2025
