In December 2008, just four months into his reign as London mayor, Boris Johnson forced Sir Ian Blair to quit as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Blair had been in the post for 45 turbulent months. This account of his time as commissioner might better be entitled Clinging to the Wreckage.
It is overwhelmingly concerned with his experience of firefighting the series of crises that dominated his later tenure: the 7/7 London bombings, the Stockwell shooting, the cash for honours inquiry, senior Asian officer Tarique Ghaffur's alleged discrimination case, a supposed sleaze row involving Blair's relationship with a Met IT contractor, and his protracted struggle to hang on when the media, the Tories and some senior policemen wanted him out.
This book is payback time against his persecutors and betrayers - and what a lengthy list he has compiled. He starts in low gear, at Oxford in the early 1970s, where he discovered that he was unsuited to the acting career he first favoured, being rejected for the university dramatic society.
The son of a Lever Brothers transport manager, he grew up in Cheshire where he says there was always less money than his mother would have liked to fulfil her social pretensions. At Christ Church, he first observed the "minor but irritating streak of upper-class nastiness, of which the now famous Bullingdon Club was only one example". Later, as a London policeman, class sensitivity was reinforced: "I understood very clearly for the first time that those with money and supposed breeding did not expect their children to be arrested." The parents of Hooray Henries who amused themselves by running along the roofs of a line of cars expected to escape consequences merely by paying for the damage.
On becoming a senior officer - he joined the Met as a graduate in 1974 - he was dismayed by media attitudes, exemplified by the Daily Mail's denunciation of him as "Labour's favourite cop…once accused of being Britain's most politically correct policeman".
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The book catalogues endless troubles with subordinates. Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick was, he says, "the only man I ever knew with a painting of himself on his office wall". Blair was "completely puzzled" by what anti-terrorist chief Andy Hayman did - and did not - tell him in the wake of the Stockwell shooting. He writes that he suspects Hayman of anonymously denouncing him to the press as a "chump".
He cites Piers Morgan, the sacked Daily Mirror editor, in defence of his own disastrously headlined remark that he could not imagine why the murder of two small white girls at Soham had become "the biggest news story in Britain".
He was bitterly aggrieved to find his office convicted on health and safety charges for the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. The Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry on the affair lasted two years and "took every opportunity to be as unforgiving as possible". He has no time for his executioner, Boris Johnson, whose "lack of interest in detail" contrasted unfavourably with the supportive behaviour of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone.
Blair, who served 30 years in uniform and as a detective, mostly with the Met but latterly as chief constable of Surrey, before getting the top job in London, obviously possesses real gifts. His promotion of neighbourhood policing, for instance, was admirable. Some of his complaints seem just. It is tough for anybody to run a modern organisation in the face of 24/7 news and relentless leaks.
Some of the personal charges against him always looked thin: Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur's claims of racial discrimination were eventually settled for a cash payment said to be much lower than his original demands. The sleaze allegation about the Met's IT contract was rejected after an investigation by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
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Blair highlights the difficulty of finding resources for community policing amid huge demands on manpower for anti-terrorist operations, and surges of public sentiment about such issues as child protection. He is justly enthusiastic about his force's work in combating a succession of terrorist plots, the conspiracy to blow up transatlantic airliners potentially the most devastating.
Blair's narrative shows how difficult it is to police a morbidly risk-averse society. We, the public, confused about priorities, surely share some responsibility for such scandals as that reported recently, of a teacher arrested, briefly jailed and charged with striking a pupil who threatened to kill him.
Britain's police structure, with 43 forces in England and Wales each possessing its own homicide branch and suchlike, is inappropriate. But Blair, by focusing on his own beleaguerment, conveys a sense of an institution forever on the back foot. His self-righteousness suggests a man unaccustomed to look in the mirror, save to check his cap is straight. It simply will not do to assert as he does that the armed officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes "should each have been awarded the George Medal" for courage.
Suicide bombers pose a serious new threat to civil society. The security forces operate under intense strain. They know that if they fail to arrest or disarm fanatics before they commit atrocities, a deluge of political and media criticism will fall upon them. Blair's timing was unlucky when he proudly told a television interviewer that the Met was "playing out of its socks" in confronting the post-7/7-bombing crisis. Just hours later, it emerged that his officers had killed an innocent man.
Successive trials and inquiries following the police operation that ended in de Menezes's death indicated alarming collective incompetence. Yet Blair rejects operational criticism, accepting only that the press handling was disastrous. His bitchiness about disloyal subordinates and his expressions of personal victimhood make unsympathetic reading. The record shows a man out of touch with what his command was doing on the ground.
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He represents himself as a prig. His decision to join the Met from Oxford was prompted, he says, by wishing to fulfil "first and foremost…a sense of service to others". As a senior officer: "Despite many invitations, I had a fairly austere approach to corporate hospitality." He quotes too many testimonials to his own merits.
His susceptibility to those who stroked him - Charles Clarke, Jack Straw, Jacqui Smith - contrasts with resentment towards others who gave him a hard time, many of them Tories, whom he accuses of making the Met a political football.
I put down Blair's account feeling a little sorry for a man who could be so foolish as to end his career by writing such a snivelling account of it. He seems not a bad copper, but he made a bad commissioner, partly because he wanted to be judged on his own terms, a luxury denied to anyone who accepts a top job in public life.
Policing Controversy by Ian Blair
Profile £20 pp320