London - (Rotters): A senior Tory MP was accused today smearing Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair with allegations about his sobriety.
London Assembly deputy chair Brian Coleman said Sir Ian "always looked suspiciously sober, like he was on duty" when everybody else was getting plastered, feeling up waitresses and snorting lines of coke in the Gents.
Coleman made his remarks in an internet feature about the role of alcohol in politics and claimed that "the Commissioner has appeared somewhat stone-cold-sober at social functions when everybody else was pissed as a fart.
"This made people suspicious that he was keeping them under surveillance which, as everybody knows, is damned bloody unfair!
"At the London Mayors' Association Annual Dinner last year he claimed he needed assistance from his protection officers to manage the stairs.
"But that was a whopper!
"I watched him pretend to be so hammered he could hardly make it to the cloakroom. But soon as he was out of sight of the others he got out his mobile, a hidden camcorder, covert bugging equipment secreted in his bow tie and a cleverly-concealed police sniffer dog that had been sitting inside his jacket pocket, on the lookout for the crack-fiends carousing at City Hall that night.
"I ask you!"
Coleman insisted that he hadn't been paid to smear the Commissioner by ex-Brixton Commander Brian Paddick who has gone on record as loathing Blair's guts:
"This is not a smear. Ian Blair was stone cold sober but arseing around like he'd had a few.
"I'm sure that's something they teach them at Detective School!"
