It was a week that began with the banking reforms and tension between some senior Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. Those representing the financial industry sounded confident that they had the ear of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor, while one Lib Dem minister characterised the government's position as a reflection of Conservative "tribalism". After the bankers came that other institution - the police - and the announcement of a new Metropolitan Police commissioner. Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former chief constable of Merseyside, is now the most senior officer in the land and will be seeking to mend fences with the government. His position is both like and unlike that of the bankers: like theirs because he will run straight into Conservative tribalism, and unlike theirs because that tribalism will be deeply opposed to the police.

In August, Charles Clarke used a column in the London Evening Standard to suggest that the Prime Minister's closest Downing Street advisers are "viscerally hostile to the police service and brief him accordingly". That is a startling statement from a former home secretary and police minister. Yet there are others who support that point of view. John Giblin, the chairman of the Police Federation's sergeants central committee, said in May: "The government, to put it bluntly, hate the police service and want to destroy it in order to rebuild it again in their own image."

Police officers have a reputation, probably well deserved, for saying too often that no one understands them, but this level of open hostility is an uncomfortable development. It is not the case that the Conservatives dislike the police per se; it is the case that they do not like the sort of police that the British police have become since the Tories last left office in 1997.

I worked in the Home Office as principal staff officer to HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary during the last Conservative administration. Relations were not always easy; one home secretary, Kenneth Clarke, muttered about "over-mighty" chief constables and tried unsuccessfully to make them less mighty through the ill-fated Sheehy inquiry. Yet there was a sense of common purpose, that the police and the Home Office were on the same side.

In reality, they were drifting apart even then. During the Thatcher and Major governments, the police were subject to a form of benign neglect, left to get on with their jobs untroubled by political interference. But as other agencies of social cohesion weakened, the police faced great changes in the public's attitude and expectations. As a result, they began to change and a new generation of better-educated and more confident police chiefs emerged.

The contrasting approach between the two main political parties became clear in the 1990s. In 1991, the Conservative government produced a white paper on the police which stated that "the main job of the police is to catch criminals". After the Jamie Bulger murder case in 1993 and Tony Blair's commitment to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", the incoming Labour government produced a statement of purpose for the police service that was markedly different. The task of the police was to "build a safe, just and tolerant society, in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families and communities are properly balanced and the protection and security of the public are maintained" - a policy position hugely strengthened by the findings of the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999, which arrived on the police like a thunderclap.

The police spent the next decade adjusting to that change of requirement. And they succeeded. All the chief officers now in post have risen within a service that believes that, while catching criminals is very important, the police can only be fully effective in reducing crime when they work with other agencies - the probation service and local government among them - on long-term solutions to the underlying problems of addiction, dysfunctional family structures and poverty of expectations. It is impossible to prove the direct connection, but this shift of emphasis coincided with the longest period of crime reduction in British history. As a result, however, we have a completely different kind of police service from the one the Tories left behind. Hogan-Howe has been appointed apparently in part because he is seen by the Tories as amenable to the government's view of policing, but the same cannot be said for the senior officers he will now inherit at the top of the Met.

Street butlers

I saw this first when the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) came into existence in 2000. While watch committees and then police authorities had been an integral part of the system of political governance across the rest of Great Britain, the home secretary had always retained exclusive control of the Met. Labour changed that, and the Conservative members of the MPA, to whom the commissioner and his senior officers now reported, seemed simply not

to recognise the police service they were overseeing. Tory members would frequently and openly display their dismay about Met policy. In particular, they criticised senior officers for making public statements of policy, which they saw as the preserve of the MPA.

There was a sense that the police had got above themselves, a sense that Tory politicians preferred police as "street butlers", appearing when required from behind an invisible green baize door and disappearing silently when no longer required. This attitude became manifest with the arrival of a Conservative mayor of London in 2008, prefiguring a national change two years later. Within Boris Johnson's first year, Kit Malthouse, his deputy, said that he wanted the next commissioner to be "pretty boring" and boasted of how he and Johnson now had "our hands on the tiller" at the Met. Moreover, Tory politicians wanted to act as spokespeople for the police rather than accept that that was the role of the commanders.

All of this was a perfectly logical political position to take, but it provides further evidence that some Conservative politicians did not understand the police. In part this is because, unlike with bankers (or doctors, or lawyers, or soldiers), Tory politicians do not know who the police are or what they really do - they have few family members in the police; they are not part of the tribe. Moreover, they do not seem interested in finding out. This leads to some strange decisions, such as the phasing out of the National Policing Improvement Agency, announced in July 2010, the Home Office apparently not noticing that it ran crucial services such as national police training and the Police National Computer. Or the decision, taken in December 2010, to wind up the Forensic Science Service, leaving police forensic needs to be answered by private-sector suppliers, which lack vital skills such as ballistics.

But the most damning example of this failure to understand the police is the proposal to replace police authorities with a directly elected police and crime commissioner, with no safeguards against their interference in operational policing. David Bayley, a professor at the University at Albany, New York, and an expert on comparative policing across the world, lists the potential dangers of political interference as "the risk of increased corruption and the undermining of standards of performance, police professionalism, public respect for the police, police morale and respect for the rule of law".

There is nothing wrong with increasing democratic accountability for the police, but it is perverse for the government to brush aside opposition to the proposal by the Police Federation of England and Wales, the Superintendents' Association, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and representatives of police authorities from all political parties. All these organisations are united, not against direct elections, but against the likelihood that candidates will campaign on a ticket of populist and socially divisive policies.

Policing fails when it concerns itself with law enforcement and crime control alone, as countless reports, including the Scarman inquiry into the 1981 Brixton riots, have shown. The fear now is that directly elected commissioners will come into office promising to deliver on these two counts, to the detriment of all else. No one is going to be elected promising to take an interest in non-local issues such as terrorism or organised crime. Minority concerns, such as crime in the black community, forced marriages, dealing with travellers and abuse in care homes, will struggle for attention and budget.

The reaction to the August riots - the first major disorders in England's cities in almost a decade - is symptomatic of the deteriorating
relationship between the government and the police. There is no doubt that the police were taken by surprise and got some things wrong. However, an unprecedented level of anti-police briefing followed, both on and off the record. Comments were made about the need for more robust action; there were calls for water cannon and rubber bullets (neither of which could be used in the fluid situations the police faced) and demands that "battle-hardened" colonels who had seen service in Iraq and Afghanistan should be drafted in. The police, in the words of one newspaper headline attempting to capture the Tory verdict, had been "too few, too slow, too timid". Senior ministers chose to represent their return from holiday as the strategic hinge on which turned the battle to restore order. The Home Secretary issued "orders" to all chief constables.

This was not only odd, but misleading. A moment's thought would make clear that the Prime Minister's appearance at Cobra, the crisis response committee, at 11am on 9 August could not produce 10,000 more police on the streets of London by 6pm on the same day. Such a tactic had been days in the development and was the outcome of police decisions. No wonder Acpo's president, Hugh Orde, described the politicians as "irrelevant" to such decisions and the acting Met Police commissioner, Tim Godwin, showed his irritation at criticism from those who "weren't there". The current breakdown in relations between the government and police has no modern parallel.

Peel repeal

There were some very good candidates for the post of commissioner - including both Orde and Godwin, as well as Steve House, chief of Strathclyde - but the pool was small. Perhaps equally capable candidates were dissuaded from putting their names forward by the political hostility they had witnessed. Now that the name of the successful candidate has emerged, senior ministers need to consider how to restore good relations. Otherwise, history may repeat itself. It is well known that Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829. However, it is perhaps less widely remembered that the Tory government of which Peel was a part fell less than 14 months later, replaced by a Whig admin­istration openly opposed to the formation of a police force. This placed the then twin commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, in a even more invidious position than any of their successors, until now.

Sensing that he could not get rid of the Met, the then home secretary, Viscount Melbourne, embarked on a policy of sidetracking demand for abolition of the police by, as one historian put it, "making show of warmly sharing popular feeling against them". This led to a grand parliamentary showdown three years later during which the commissioners accused Melbourne of interfering with operations. He denied the charge, but to his fury (and damage to his reputation), a committee of inquiry sided with the commissioners.

Repeating unhappy history is usually unwise. To avoid such a fate, the coalition needs to do some listening.

Ian Blair was commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 2005 to 2008 and sits as a crossbench peer