That Institutionally Stupid Commisioner

It is quite difficult to work out which is more scary – that the capital's police are led by a man who has no understanding of history, or a man who is so stupid that he hasn't the sense to keep his mouth closed when he doesn't know what he is talking about.

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Dr Helen Szamuely asks : Who will rid us of this talkative plod?

Plod Blair, Sir Ian of that Ilk, has been opining again. Specifically he was giving another interview on BBC Radio 4. Having waffled his way through the Forest Gate episode (of which we still don't know the whole truth) and asserted his belief (which we share) that he will be cleared over the Menezes shooting, he went into what one can only describe as hyper mode about a potential al-Quaeda threat:

''Christmas is a period when that might happen. We have no specific intelligence to do (with) that. It is a far graver threat in terms of civilians than either the Cold War or the Second World War. It's a much graver threat than that posed by Irish Republican terrorism.''

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Does this man know any history at all?

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While it is reasonable to say that the present terrorist threat is different from that posed by the IRA for several decades, it is actually not worth saying. Everyone has made that point and we have all acccepted it. The only problem, is why are people like Plod Blair and his various minions of differing ranks are looking at the IRA? Why not look at the international terrorism of the seventies? They will find quite a number of parallels there.

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But hey, that would be reading history and that is something our senior plods do not do.The idea of equating the Second World War and the Cold War in terms of civilian casualties in Britain is so daft as to defy explanation. Apart from a few ex-KGB agents and pesky emigres, all murdered by the Soviet secret service or their henchmen in, say, Bulgaria, there were no civilian casualties in the Cold War.

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When we look at the Second World War, the picture is starkly different. It has been calculated that the blitz and the V1/V2 attacks between them killed around 60,000 in London and wounded many more. They were almost all civilians. When we add the horrific attacks on Coventry, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and other more casual ones like the Baedeker raids, we must assume that the death toll was probably 100,000 and more. The destruction of property was stupendous.

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Is Plod Blair telling us that a putative al-Quaeda attack for which he has no specific intelligence (that's nothing to go by) will be worse? Or is he simply so ignorant of the history of his own country that he says the first thing that comes into his head?