WHEN Sir Paul Stephenson was appointed head of London’s police force, he pledged that there would be a clean break from the series of scandals which had undermined his predecessor Sir Ian Blair.

But, as Tony Blair discovered after he famously declared that New Labour had to be “whiter than white”, making a clean break from the past is never as easy as it may seem.

So soon into his tenure as Scotland Yard commissioner, Sir Paul has been forced to appoint a new national head of anti-terrorism following the elementary gaffe made by Bob Quick in jeopardising a secret operation.

And the commissioner is now facing increasing controversy over police tactics in handling the G20 protests in London on April 1.

With a second post-mortem overturning the original cause given for the death of newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson, Sir Paul now faces the grim prospect of one of his officers facing a manslaughter charge.

The sequence of events does not look at all good from a police perspective.

First, Mr Tomlinson’s family were informed that he had not been in contact with the police. Then, after video footage emerged which showed him being pushed and struck by an officer, a first post mortem concluded that he had died of a heart attack. Now it appears the cause of death was abdominal bleeding.

With other cases of alleged police brutality during the protests coming to light, the need for a swift and transparent conclusion to an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission has become even more important.