Mayor Boris plots against Sir Ian Blair

It appears Boris Johnson has been making moves to remove Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner. Ostensibly this is because of Blair's links with a businessman who won £3m of Scotland Yard contracts, currently the subject of an inquiry, but the London Mayor has made little secret of his lack of faith in the capital's top policeman since he won the mayoralty in May.

Now leaked e-mails obtained by the Times reveal that Johnson's aides have been in communication with the Met lawyers, asking how they would go about suspending Sir Ian. The author of the emails is Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor. In correspondence with one official, he wrote: "Essentially it's the mayor's decision to suspend or not." However, Johnson has discovered it will not be easy to dislodge Blair, who is something of a limpet on a rock. In response to Malthouse's email, David Riddle, the Metropolitan Police Authority's legal adviser, said: "If there is to be action against the commissioner, it has got to be lawful... If the nuclear button is pressed, expect it to be crawled over for legal flaws."

Riddle, who described the situation as "uniquely serious", asked for his legal advice to be shown to the mayor. The lawyer said that he also expected Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and her officials to be "in the loop" and for the Independent Police Complaints Commission to be kept informed.

However, when the Times confronted Malthouse he denied there was a plot against Sir Ian, and said that he was merely investigating the "accountability and methodology" of the procedure. "These are internal emails asking what might or might not happen in a hypothetical situation – it’s nothing more than that," he said. "I've been in the job six weeks so I guess I was querying whether it was appropriate to go there [the professional standards subcommittee]."

Earlier this week, writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson vowed that it would be so difficult for the Labour Party to dislodge Gordon Brown that he, Johnson, would easily lose a stone in weight before Brown was gone. How much will he have lost by the time Sir Ian is gone?