Pink-cheeked Gove staged the great escape
TO LONDON’S poshest think-tank, Policy Exchange, where the audience – men in covert coats, women in pearls and pashminas – could have been grandparents of the Made in Chelsea cast.
We had gathered to hear David Cameron’s thoughts on penal reform. Or as his long, thoughtful, liberal speech might as easily have been titled, ‘how further to pinch Centre-Left turf, make it hard for Labour to attack us as the nasty party – and distract the media from the EU row which I am ballsing-up bigtime’.
An immediate baby elephant lingered in the room. It was in the front row, wearing spectacles and a pair of cheeks so pink and chubby they could have been an infant’s ‘bontom’ (as our daughter Eveleen once called hers). I refer to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Justice.
Mr Gove is so far an Unknown Quantity on the great EU referendum question. Rumours abound. Will the Gover back Mr Cameron’s less-than-whelming ‘renegotiation deal’ or will he stay true to his Eurosceptic past and vote Leave?
Mr Gove and Boris Johnson, who is flashing his ankles like a flamenco dancer to both sides of the referendum debate, are the big prizes in the EU contest.
Mr Gove came scuttling in to the room at Policy Exchange’s Westminster offices, so late that we inky lowlifes of Her Majesty’s Working Press could not interrogate him. He repeated the scuttle at the end of the speech – I have seldom seen the old horse move so fast.
Thus were we deprived of any opportunity to question the elusive Gove about his EU intentions. All I can report is that this face by the end was the colour of a postbox.
MRCameron’s speech reflected prisons thinking supervised by Mr Gove since he succeeded rightwing clunker Chris Grayling at Justice. There are to be Gove-style reform prisons, rather like the free schools he introduced when Education Secretary.
The rhetoric is a balance of tradition and innovation and is designed to win back the P word (‘progressive’) for the Conservatives. This, again, is something at which Mr Gove has long been adroit.
Sure enough, BBC radio was using the P word in connection with the Cameron speech even before he began it at 12.45pm. To get the Left-leaning penal reform establishment cooing over Tory proposals: this will be sweet music to the Cameroons as they colonise New Labour territory.
The speech was sparkier than many prime ministerial orations. Had it been given topspin (as we call it in the trade) by ex-newspaperman Gove?
It spoke of prisons’ central bureaucracy so abundant that it runs to ‘46,000 pages of rules, regulations and guidance’, including policy on how many jigsaws or sheets of music a prisoner may keep in his cell’ (the answer is 12). The ‘ask head office’ approach to prison governance will be replaced by greater autonomy.
Some cells were currently so rough that a staff member had said ‘I wouldn’t keep a dog in there’. Depends on what type of dog you have, really. Terriers are rather hardier than pekes.
Mr Cameron proposed use of satellite communications to track early-release cons. Let’s hope they don’t get picked up by BBC licence fee detector vans.
The only former jailbird I could identify in the audience of about 100 was Sean O’Callaghan, former IRA terrorist. Historian Andrew Roberts was there, as was Charity Commission boss Willie Shawcross, the new Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke, and Lord Longford’s son, retired diplomat Michael Pakenham.
By bigging up Mr Gove, as he did, Mr Cameron will have chiselled himself a little further into the Justice Secretary’s too tender loyalties. The Prime Minister, after nods to Ken Clarke and Mr Grayling, also singled out former Tory shadow prisons spokesman Nick Herbert for a mention.
Mr Herbert is one of those former Eurosceptics who in recent days has started gushing about the PM’s renegotiation efforts. We can expect to see him back in office soon.