London elections 2008

The former 'cannabis cop'

Former Met police commander is running on a law and order platform, claiming his experience means he's the best man to sort out the streets

Link to video: Paddick on the campaign trail Brian Paddick, the former Metropolitan police borough commander dubbed the "cannabis cop" during his stint as Lambeth police chief, is now setting his sights on running the capital as the first Liberal Democrat mayor of London.

The 49-year-old was the highest ranked openly gay police officer when he retired from the Met last year after thirty years' service. Drawing heavily on his policing experience, the mayoral candidate is urging Londoners to "judge me on my track record".

Smart, handsome, thick-skinned and outspoken, Paddick is using the campaign platform to tell anxious Londoners he is the only candidate who can make them feel safe again. He argues that the mayor should chair the Met police authority, and wants additional administrative police support in place to allow officers to spend more time on the streets.

Unusually for a former policeman, he opposes ID cards. He is also against the government's plans to extend detention without trial for terror suspects on the grounds that it would only serve to ostracise the Muslim community.

He supports intelligence-led stop and search, but argues that recording interventions is necessary to protect people's rights.

The son of a plastics salesman and a building society secretary first came to national attention in 2001, when he pioneered a strategy that shifted the focus from cannabis offences to harder drugs and street crime.

Trouble brewed when a former lover alleged to a tabloid newspaper that the borough commander had smoked marijuana himself – a claim which Paddick vehemently denied.

Paddick was moved sideways to a desk job overseeing operational policy despite the fact that no charges were ever brought. At the time, Ken Livingstone, Paddick's current rival for the mayoralty, lent his support to a campaign to reinstate Paddick as borough commander for Lambeth, but this was unsuccessful.

Paddick then became acting assistant commissioner for territorial policing, where he clashed with the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was mistakenly believed to be a terror suspect.

He challenged Blair's claims that he (Blair) had not known about the police shooting for 24 hours. Paddick insisted that Blair had known within hours. He spent his last twelve months at the Met working on the management of police information before hanging up his truncheon in May 2006.


Promising to be a "listening" mayor, Paddick has vowed to work closely with London's 33 boroughs, "not against them", and cites his track record as a police commander to prove he can handle multimillion –pound budgets and manage large teams.

Born and raised in Tooting, south London, he has always policed in the capital. He has a first from Oxford in politics, philosophy and economics, and an MBA from Warwick business school.

On transport, Paddick wants to reduce fares by allowing travellers who need to use more than one bus to arrive at their destination to pay once for a journey within an hour period (currently, passengers are charged for each bus journey).

He used the Lib Dem mayoral hustings at the party's annual conference to suggest that he could end the bane of transport strikes for London by negotiating a no-strike agreement with transport unions.

Passionate about community cohesion, Paddick boasts long dealings in community relations during various policing jobs across London, and has spoken before of his own experiences of discrimination as an openly gay officer.

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