Lord Imbert
Met Commissioner whose patient negotiation during the Balcombe Street siege persuaded IRA gunmen to give themselves up
LORD IMBERT, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Peter Imbert, who has died aged 84, was celebrated for his commitment to open policing but exasperated many of his colleagues with what they saw as his insistence on washing dirty linen in public.
In 1979, when he was chief constable of Thames Valley Police, Imbert allowed a BBC documentary crew free access to make the controversial five-part series, Police, showing his officers at work.
One of the programmes, which included footage of the highly insensitive treatment of a rape victim by male investigating officers, caused an outcry and stimulated changes in the way police dealt with such crimes.
Imbert’s policy of openness did not stop short of himself. When reporters from a BBC Newsnight programme researching a profile of him were unable to find anyone to fault the man, Imbert put them in touch with a couple of people he knew to be enemies. “I don’t want to be remembered as just a bland Mr Plod. I’d rather you had the complete picture,” he said.
Imbert’s avuncular relationship with the media was put under some strain in 1989 when the “Guildford Four” (convicted in 1975 for the Guildford pub bombings of October 1974) were released following a long campaign for justice. Although not directly involved in the case, Imbert had been a member of the Metropolitan Police bomb squad at the time and saw all four defendants during the initial detention period. More significant was his involvement in the Balcombe Street siege of December 1975, when he persuaded an IRA Active Service Unit to surrender and helped to interrogate them. The leader of the Balcombe Street gang then confessed to the pub bombings at both Guildford and Woolwich.
Imbert always maintained that these confessions did not negate those made by the Guildford Four: “They could all have been involved.” A subsequent judicial inquiry was held by Sir John May, with a report published in 1994, which led to the trial of three Surrey Police officers in 1993 in relation to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. They stood trial and were acquitted.
Peter Michael Imbert was born at Folkestone, Kent, on April 27 1933 and educated at Harvey Grammar School, Folkestone, and the Holborn College of Law, Languages and Commerce.
He did his National Service in the RAF before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1953, when he was posted to Bow Street station as a foot-duty constable. Three years later he was appointed a detective constable and transferred to Special Branch – where he was to remain for the next 20 years.
The progress of detective officers was slow in those days, and Imbert, when a detective inspector, often referred to himself as a “dead-beat” – implying that he had reached the limit of his advancement.
But a period of attachment to the Bomb Squad (later renamed the Anti-terrorist Branch), was to change all that. Seconded primarily as an intelligence officer, Imbert threw himself wholeheartedly into the full range of the squad’s activities and rapidly acquired a reputation for hard work. He became confidant and adviser to the two heads of the squad he served, Commanders Huntley and Habershon.
Although investigating a vast number of terrorist incidents, including the murder of PC Tibble at Hammersmith, it was the siege of Balcombe Street that made Imbert a household name. A trap had been set for the team of IRA terrorists who had been marauding London for some months. During the evening of December 6 1975, four men opened fire on Scott’s Restaurant in a drive-by shooting in the heart of Mayfair. An extensive police operation had been prepared and officers gave chase.
The terrorists, confused by the swift response of the police, panicked and split up in Dorset Square, but fortuitously came together again in Balcombe Street, where they broke into a first-floor council flat and took the hapless occupants hostage.
The siege continued for six days. Imbert, then a detective superintendent, conducted the negotiations. Finally, after dint of patient and continuous attrition, he persuaded the gunmen to give themselves up and the hostages were released unharmed.
The skill Imbert demonstrated at Balcombe Street helped to secure him a place on the Senior Command Course at the Police College which began the following month. Typically, he was dealing with yet another terrorist outrage until three o’clock in the morning of the day the interviews began.
He arrived looking tired and dishevelled, but impressed the board by his competence. Within weeks of beginning the year-long course at Bramshill, Imbert was appointed Assistant Chief Constable of Surrey, having been a detective chief superintendent for a matter of only a few weeks.
But those few weeks were long enough for him to visit Vienna to study the Opec siege in which, among others, Sheikh Yamani had been held, and to visit the scenes of the two South Moluccan sieges in Holland.
Despite the fact that his then Chief Constable, Sir Peter Matthews, light-heartedly complained of Imbert’s constant absence lecturing on terrorism, he was appointed Deputy Chief Constable 18 months after joining the Surrey force.
It seemed now that Imbert was moving too fast for his own good – the hierarchy of the British police being resistant to what they see as high-flyers – and he was tacitly advised not to apply for the Chief Constableship of Thames Valley when it fell vacant in 1979.
Imbert cheerfully pointed out that the police authority could only reject him. They did not: he was appointed in March of that year.
He then took a risk that many thought might finish his career. He was asked if he would allow the filming of his force over a period of weeks – for a “fly-on-the-wall” documentary. Against advice from many colleagues, he agreed. The result was spectacular television from which Imbert’s force did not always emerge with credit.
After the rape incident controversy, Imbert acknowledged openly that his men had been wrong, but not that he had been wrong to allow the filming, and instigated improvements to the handling of rape cases at Thames Valley. The changes he introduced – including the provision of so-called “rape suites” – were adopted throughout the country.
In 1985 Imbert returned to the Metropolitan Police as its Deputy Commissioner and it came as no surprise when he succeeded Sir Kenneth Newman as Commissoner at the expiry of the latter’s reforming period of office in August 1987. One of his earliest utterances on taking office was to praise the work of his predecessor, and to state his intention of continuing the programme of change.
His own major contribution to policing in the 1990s was the “Plus” programme. Sensing that the police service in general, and the Metropolitan Police in particular, was losing public confidence, Imbert, aided by a firm of public relations consultants, set about a massive programme of improving the force’s corporate image and its communication both internally and externally. The programme saw the Metropolitan Police Force renamed the “Metropolitan Police Service” and the promulgation of a Statement of Common Purpose and Values.
Imbert’s 37 years of police service saw radical changes, many of which were not of the force’s making, which took it from the comfortable George Dixon image to policeman wearing body armour and prepared, if occasion demanded, to use tear-gas. It was not an image that Imbert sought, and there is no doubt that his period of office, with politics intruding to a greater extent than ever before, was stressful.
But Imbert was of equable disposition and imbued with a strong sense of humour. Far from being a remote figure like some of his predecessors, he was always ready to stop for a chat with any member of the force, police officers and civil staff alike. Even when research staff suggested changes with which he disagreed, he was prepared to take an objective view and implement their proposals if he thought it was for the good of the force.
He had little time for ceremony and there is a much-repeated story about his arrival on the back of a police motorbike at the police training school at Sulhamstead for the annual reception. His Jaguar staff-car had broken down on the M4 and Imbert had commandeered the motorbike from an astonished outrider.
On another occasion, during his time as Surrey’s Deputy Chief Constable, he was on the way to work when he picked up a police radio call from a young constable who needed help in a chase. Imbert immediately diverted his car to the scene where he jumped out and cornered the thief in a back garden.
When the regular uniformed officers caught up they found Imbert, in civilian clothes, lecturing the captured crook. When asked who he was, the Deputy Chief Constable replied: “Just a passer-by.”
Imbert was a gifted lecturer and from 1978 onwards gave talks on terrorism in places as far afield as Berlin, Australia and the FBI Academy at Quantico. In 1990 he was to have been one of the speakers at an international conference on terrorism in central London where a timed IRA bomb was found under the lectern.
From 1980 to 1987 he was a member of the General Advisory Council of the BBC, and from 1980 to 1985 was secretary and chairman of the National Crime Committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He was a regular reviewer of publications dealing with terrorism, sieges and police negotiating.
Imbert often had recourse to his favourite poets, and to Gilbert and Sullivan, during policy discussions. His annual reports were usually resonant with quotations.
He was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in 1980 and was knighted in 1988. He was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Greater London in 1998, was created a life peer in 1999 and was appointed CVO in 2008. He was a patron of the Association of Security Consultants, which named an annual prize, the Imbert Prize, in his honour.
In 1990 his portrait by Henry Mee was featured in the “British Eminencies” exhibition, showing the Commissioner in his blue-andsilver uniform, feathered cockedhat beside him on a chair. In his caption to the picture Anthony Powell observed that “the quiet gorgeousness of this turnout inclines one to accept the goodnatured, easy-going demeanour of the sitter, which may well have taken in more than one evildoer to his disadvantage”.
Imbert, who retired in 1993, listed his recreations in Who’s Who as “bad bridge, coarse golf and talking about my grandchildren”.
He married, in 1956, Iris Dove, who survives him with their son and two daughters.
Lord Imbert, born April 27 1933, died November 13 2017