House Magazine Diary - Monday 21 January
The House is back, my oldest is hard at work, my middle one is back at university, and the youngest is back at school. The hideous weekly commute has started and ‘life’ is back to ‘normal’. I am supposed to be recording an interview about prostitution on The Politics Show at 10am this morning – it’s fun, fun, fun in the shadow justice team – but I am stood down or ‘pulled’ as we say in the media world, or perhaps not. In any event, it gives me more time to prepare for the report stage of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill this afternoon.
In one sense there is little need to prepare, because the government has guillotined the debate as well as introduced hundreds of new provisions into the bill today, so there will be no time to have a sensible discussion on anything. There will be little time even to debate what the bill used to look like, let alone all these new and far-reaching provisions. They have made a mockery of parliamentary democracy and idiots of themselves – the minister introducing the timetable motion has the decency to look embarrassed, as well he might.
The secretary of state comes in and out of the chamber during the day, sometimes speaking from the Despatch Box, sometimes from his seat and sometimes from elsewhere and, at one stage, in a light-hearted if schoolboy manner, I was reduced to expressing my frustration at this entire charade by cocking a snook at him. This apparently is a very poor show. Jack laughed; I did too, but I am not sure any of this was very funny.
There is no press coverage of the previous day’s shenanigans in crushing parliamentary debate, although there was some coverage of the last minutes of the day’s events when a wholly new provision abolishing the law of blasphemy was briefly debated and then withdrawn by its proponent, Evan Harris, when Maria Eagle said she would come back with a government proposal in the Lords. ‘If you can’t take a joke, don’t join up’ is the obvious response to that complaint. It is not the right answer though, and the government should stop behaving like this. Indeed, no government should behave like that.
I cool off with an enjoyable lunch with a journalist. No alcohol, one course and plenty to talk about. I leave polishing my self-awarded halo and basking in my self-declared reputation for flawless political analysis – clearly the journalist had had a wonderful time being talked at.
Back at the Commons I have a meeting with the Co-op – not the shop, but the landowning and development division which owns almost 5,000 acres of farmland in Harborough, on which it wants to build a so-called eco-town. It won’t be ‘eco’ at all, and will cause the most devastating damage to rural southeast Leicestershire. If it goes ahead, it will go ahead because this government wants it to go ahead, and not because the local planning authority will have decided on the matter. It’s so good to be elected to a Parliament which makes no real decisions, and from which I can report back to my constituents that they can’t make any either. I must try to remember to check my blood pressure more often.
In the evening my wife and I go to a High Court judge’s retirement party – he’s young, has several more years of judging left in him, but he is off round the world to enjoy himself. Sensible fellow.
Back in Market Harborough, I take the Post Office team closing post offices to see one of the three they want to close in my constituency. By some mysterious coincidence, despite the monsoon lashing down outside, over 100 local and not-so local users of this post office are there to greet us and to let the Post Office people know what they think of the plan to shut this one. I take the Post Office people to the two other post offices they say are adequate substitutes for this one. I hope they get the point. Sometimes running the world from Whitehall, looking down the wrong end of a telescope and going no closer than a map, gives you the wrong impression. Let’s hope they get the right impression from now on.
My wife is running in a 10km race in Surrey this morning and the weather is awful. When she arrives back in Leicestershire, having done extremely well but feeling pretty tired, I look at her feet and wonder where she gets the strength to endure the pain and the blisters. A look of ‘you weedy fusspot’ comes over her face as she starts on the next 50 things she wants to achieve, before we go out to dinner with some friends that evening. I retreat to my office to deal with surgery cases and a pile of correspondence, pretending to myself that typing at least keeps my fingers fit.
Domestic bliss and gardening. I have a sack of bulbs that I should have planted in the autumn sprouting in the garage. Emergency digging of a few holes soon puts them in the earth and I dare say they will soon turn into daffodils and add to the riot of disorganised planting I am responsible for throughout the garden. More indulgent looks from the management, but little chance of a star rating for this public servant in that quarter. Back to London in the early evening.
Criminal justice, probation, prisons and more prisons: that’s what I do in the justice team. It is work I have done for the last two years and it is work that has got into my system. I enjoy it and I have got to know quite a bit about it since David Cameron appointed me to the job. As a lawyer and a Recorder who has sent people to prison I thought I knew a fair bit about the criminal justice system and the prison estate. I have discovered that even after two years I have a good deal more to discover and to appreciate.
It is a hidden world in which people do extraordinary and unsung things for us and for the inmates, many of whom are illiterate substance-abusers with mental illnesses. The conditions within our prison estate vary from the frankly squalid to the reasonable and humane. But the blot on the government’s escutcheon in this area of public policy is its negligent management and lack of strategic planning – how else can it have overseen a rise in the population from 60,000 to 81,500 in ten years without a corresponding increase in capacity? If I do nothing else of any merit between now and the next election, I intend to ensure that the Conservative Party gets there with a coherent and practical policy for the future of this aspect of the criminal justice system. In between meeting the lawyer from Google (to talk about privacy) and our own shadow team meeting, I spend today plotting the future for prisons.
To West Ruislip on the Central Line to meet Blue Sky, the charity that through its sister company Groundwork employs ex-prisoners on gardening and other ground work schemes on behalf of local authorities. This is perhaps the only company that makes it a requirement for any job applicant to have a criminal record and to have spent time in prison. Nick Hurd, the local MP, has, like his father Douglas, taken up the issue of the resettlement of prisoners with a passion, and I was delighted to meet the staff and employees working for Hillingdon Borough Council.
It was pouring with rain, it was cold and generally not a good day to be out working in Hillingdon’s open spaces, but I met five former prisoners working away under the supervision of another former offender. This was real work for which they were receiving real wages. This programme was going to give them a start back in society from which they could show that they were ready and willing to take responsibility for themselves, their dependants and for their futures and keep off drugs and crime. We need more of this type of activity. It measurably reduces the re-offending rate.
I get back to Westminster to have a sandwich with Peter Riddell of the Times and some other Conservative colleagues before meeting a property expert to discuss the shape and size of the prison estate. Dinner in the House, and then home.
This morning it’s probation and community sentencing and supervision. All of the constituent parts of the criminal justice system, although to some extent self-standing components, are no more than part of what should be a seamless whole. It is not always presented in that way and it does not always work that way, but if it were managed properly instead of being treated as some hornet’s nest that occasionally gets a poke with a sharp stick from headline-seeking ministers, it might have a better chance of success.
Then to the Lords to hand over the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill to the opposition frontbench there. There is an appetite for engaging with this bill in that House that can be satisfied in more ways than in ours. There they set their own timetable, there they have the space to scrutinise; there they do the work that we should be doing. This bill now runs to two volumes, 176 clauses and 34 schedules. I said at second reading that it is like a plum duff but with more duff than plums. The duff is now so pervasive that it has become indigestible.
This afternoon I head for the 1922 Committee to hear David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson before a quick visit to the Middle Temple to welcome the new treasurer, Michael Blair QC. Back for the 7pm vote and then to the Cavalry and Guards Club for an Oxford reunion of 66 men and women from the 1970 and ’71 intakes. We are older although none yet a grandparent, some of us greyer, in some cases (mine) fatter, and in all cases noisy and pleased to meet again after a two-year interval. Home by midnight before I turn to stone.
