The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was right and within his rights to ask the head of the Metropolitan police to go. When a politician is elected declaring that he has no confidence in a civic official, he should honour that mandate. Johnson has done so.

The induced resignation of Sir Ian Blair marks a welcome step in the overdue restoration of authority to local democracy in Britain. That it may not conform to the spirit of the law, which requires the mayor first to consult the home secretary on the office of commissioner, was perhaps unfortunate. So, too, was the declaration that Johnson would not appoint a permanent replacement until a future Tory government is elected.

But the rage of Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, on Thursday was synthetic. She had funked initiating the same decision in the summer. She knew there was a problem with Blair, which she admitted in not overturning Johnson’s decision, as she had power to do. The truth is that Johnson did her job for her and on the very day he took over as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority. She looks as petulant as she does impotent.

A few tears should be shed over Blair. He was a decent, liberal policeman of the new school, a university-educated but practical frontline officer of a type much needed by the profession. He did something to end the right-wing, macho “canteen culture” that has done policing in the capital no good in recent years. He was a sensible reformer with his heart in the right place.

For Blair that was not enough. He established respect but never full command over a notoriously recalcitrant force used to getting its own way on a loose rein from the Home Office. He never fully combated such covert and costly corruption as the overmanning of big-overtime events and the aversion to street patrols. The one international rating on which London’s police outscore all others is on VIP protection, which is no surprise to observers of the modern capital. The West End and housing estates are almost unpoliced or left to community wardens and private security firms while Whitehall and parliament crawl with chatting officers.

The Met is no longer by far the Audit Commission’s least efficient force in Britain, but it remains dogged by Home Office bureaucracy, meetings, form-filling and a fixation with careering round the streets in screaming cars. London is dreadfully policed, largely because its officers prefer to be in the most comfortable places at the most comfortable times. Any visitor to the precinct-based New York force notices an instant difference.

Blair’s Labour friends can hardly complain that his downfall was “politically motivated” by the Tories, since he was the most politically motivated leader of the Met in modern times. Since taking office in 2005 he puzzled fellow officers by kowtowing to the home secretary’s plea for support for identity cards and 42-day detention, when all round him counselled caution. The truth is, he was trying to keep his friends in power. The overpromotion of nonwhite officers haunted Blair in the humiliation of being sued by two of them for race discrimination. Paying his friend’s public-relations firm £15,000 “to advise him on his image” has the mind boggling at the misjudgment.

As for the shooting of innocent men by Blair’s buccaneering gunmen, it tallies with my own experience of being stopped by a loud-mouthed, rifle-toting officer in an unmarked car for allegedly “driving dangerously” round Hyde Park Corner. The impression was of a reckless and undisciplined force no longer fearing proper control. The Jean Charles de Menezes affair was not a surprise.

This sense of an able man not in full command of his job was sensed throughout the higher reaches of London’s government.

Johnson might have been more diplomatic towards the home secretary in resolving the difficulty. But he was out to make a point: that the people of London, through their elected mayor, were resuming charge of their city. The mayoralty has come of age in this affair. Ken Livingstone, Johnson’s predecessor, leapt to Blair’s defence, making Johnson’s point for him that the police chief was his man and that of his colleagues in Downing Street. Blair was never agile enough to become Johnson’s man. He was tarred with the Livingstone brush.

Police politics over the decade since the hyper-centralisation of Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard has displayed a craving for local accountability. To restore confidence that those in authority have a grip on law and order, as in the current rash of knife crime, requires more than vacuous statements in the House of Commons. The mayor and police chief must forge an alliance. They need not be of the same party, but they must stand together.

This alliance has been acknowledged in the person of Ray Mallon, the successful elected mayor of Middlesbrough, himself formerly a police chief. Even the Tories, desperately hesitant about any return to local democracy, recognise that in policing they cannot stand in its way. They have proposed elected local “sheriffs” on the American pattern. It is not clear what these sheriffs would do or what would be their relationship to elected councils. But Johnson has shown that establishing a direct bond between public order and ordinary citizens is now a widespread demand.

That the Met also performs national functions in counterterrorism, fraud and VIP protection is neither here nor there. It does so “under contract” to the nation. Whitehall has run the Met since the mid-19th century and it has been a tale of corruption, union dominance, misplaced priorities and waste.

Recent government attempts to supplant locally accountable forces, either by mass amalgamation or through such innovations as a National Crime Squad and a Serious Organised Crime Agency, have been a fiasco. The idea of Whitehall, in its present state of consultant-infested demoralisation, running a British FBI is laughable. Whitehall just cannot do frontline public service.

For all the micro-managerialism of the Home Office, this is a service that must be answerable to citizens at the lowest tier of government, that of the neighbourhood, municipality and parish. When a patrol car races down my street, siren blaring, to be the 10th on the scene of a “reported pickpocket” within a target response time, I do not feel safe, merely angry. Such responses do nothing to prevent robbery in the first place.

All I know is that my street is “policed” only by a standing army of traffic wardens, whose zero tolerance of traffic offences and whose blind eye turned to petty crime makes a mockery of all other crime-busting efforts.

I remember visiting a police station in Chicago and finding one officer present for every 10 on the street. At Charing Cross the opposite ratio held. It is easy to romanticise Dixon of Dock Green’s relations with his local watch committee, but something was undeniably lost when the committee became a Home Office rulebook.

The Home Office under Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and Smith has fought to retain sovereignty over the Met, despite the supposed devolution of control over it to London’s government. Successive home secretaries refused to end the target culture and saddled all police forces with reorganisation and new offences by the day.

Johnson has much to do to reverse these inefficiencies and make London’s police answerable to Londoners. But he has begun. He has staged a democratic coup. When I see a policeman on my street I shall know it has succeeded.

simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk

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