The Tory Party must defend law and order

The Conservatives are jeopardising their reputation as the party of law and order. The police are a mess, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is a mess, the prisons are a mess – and David Gauke’s decision not to pursue a judicial review of the release of John Worboys, the black cab rapist, risks making the Government look like a mess. That a man accused of attacking about 100 women could walk out of jail having served less than 10 years is sickening. That a Tory Justice Secretary could stand before the House and say that he can do nothing about it, but others are welcome to try, is ridiculous. How did the Conservatives come to this point?

The mistakes made in the Worboys case began, of course, before the Tories won office. His 2009 prosecution, when Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was head of the CPS, was botched: Worboys was prosecuted for 19 offences, only one of which was rape. It was commonly reasoned at the time that those guilty of acts that were depraved but didn’t qualify for life could still be kept in prison on an “indeterminate sentence”. But indeterminate sentences were abused and the courts turned against them. In 2012 they were abolished.

How this change in the law affected Worboys we do not know – partly because the Parole Board won’t explain its reasoning. Perhaps he did fulfil the conditions for release. If so, a technicality has led to an injustice. The scale of Worboys’ crimes demands far more than 10 years served, and their premeditation is why many find it hard to believe he could be reformed. Rapists can be stubbornly recidivist. The Ministry of Justice recently scrapped the sex offender programme it had used since 1992 on the grounds that it might not work: a review found that prisoners who took the course were, in fact, more likely to re-offend than those who did not.

There is chaos inside our prisons. Violence, drugs and self-harm are rife: the inspectorate has labelled HMP Nottingham “unsafe” and HMP Liverpool “appalling”. New money is coming, but the problem is cultural as well as financial. Private security companies have got to prove that they can command the authority of the tough-as-nails wardens of yesterday, and jail appears to be weakening as a deterrent. Last year, the total number of recorded crimes in England and Wales topped five million for the first time.

Figures also showed that annual arrests had halved since 2008. Softer sentencing was given as the reason, but police forces treating crimes such as burglary as trivial must also, surely, have been a factor. The message officers send when they pose for Twitter in make-up or investigate dead men is that they are not serious about their job. And while the CPS has to explain why it failed to put Worboys away for good, it also needs to account for the number of rape cases that collapse at trial at the same time that an obviously guilty man walks free.

Ultimately, the government of the day must take some responsibility for all of this. David Cameron did great damage with his “hug a hoodie” agenda; Theresa May, as his Home Secretary, embraced the equality, diversity, softly-softly ethos. After all, the European Court may well have ruled against indeterminate sentences, which were certainly flawed, but the UK government concurred – and clearly failed to anticipate the consequences. While Mr Cameron was in Number 10, the Tories coasted on crime rates that were falling because of complex social or technological factors. With his former Home Secretary installed as Prime Minister, the chickens are coming home to roost.

If the Tories do not get on top of this, they could – in a bizarre twist – allow Labour to occupy natural Conservative ground. Sadiq Khan says he will seek a judicial review of the Parole Board’s Worboys decision. In reality, the London Mayor is as woolly as a Corbynite: he has blamed the capital’s crime spike, in part, on funding cuts to youth services. Yet by failing to appear decisive, the Tories risk ceding this life and death issue to the Left. They must return to defending law and order: not just for their own good but, more importantly, for the security of the British public.