Reforming jihadists is straight out of Waugh

The deaths inside and outside Fishmongers’ Hall last Friday were tragic. Two good people, and one bad one they had tried to help, died. Others were badly injured.

Yet when I read the extraordinary details of the events – the fact that the attacks were made at an anniversary celebration of a rehabilitation programme backed by Cambridge University, and that the killer, Usman Khan, was himself a star pupil of that programme; the fact that people who were themselves criminals joined in to disarm the murderer – the memory of a satire niggled at the back of my mind.

Eventually I identified it – it was “the Lucas-dockery Experiments”. Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, is chiefly remembered for its comic scenes of a ghastly prep school and for its depiction of the Oxford University Bullingdon Club (whose later members included Boris Johnson and David Cameron), thinly disguised as the Bollinger Club. But the book also contains a witty dissection of a certain sort of do-goodery. For reasons that need not detain us here, the book’s anti-hero, Paul Pennyfeather, finds himself doing seven years’ penal servitude for traffic in prostitution.

The prison governor, Sir Wilfred Lucas-dockery, is an enlightened professor of sociology appointed by a Labour home secretary. He strongly disagrees with his conservative predecessor, Colonel Macadder, who held to the view that “If you make prison bad enough, people’ll take jolly good care to keep out of it”. “So far as is possible,” says Sir Wilfred benignly, “I like the prisoners to carry on with their avocations in civilian life.” He is also keen on a “system of progressive stages” for rehabilitation, such as being allowed after a bit to write and receive letters, aided by “little innovations” such as a “Thought for the Day” which he pins up each morning.

Naturally, Sir Wilfred falls out with the chief warder, who takes a dimmer view of human nature, and reports attempted suicides using the tools supplied in the Arts and Crafts Workshop and prisoners eating the glue in the Bookbinding Shop in preference to their porridge.

In Paul’s case, Sir Wilfred concludes that the best Lucasdockery experiment for him is to be placed in the company of only one prisoner, with whom he must talk solely of philosophy, history, etc. The man the governor selects, a redhead, whose “vast red hands curl convulsively at his sides” is a religiomaniac who “looks daily for the Second Coming” and says he is inside for obeying an angel’s command to “Kill and spare not”.

Sir Wilfred crossly rejects Paul’s objection that the redhead is a “dangerous lunatic”. Having discovered that the man was a carpenter by trade, he identifies “another case of the frustrated creative urge” and insists that he be given a set of carpenter’s tools. That will “get to the cause of the trouble”, unlike the prison’s Standing Orders which merely “repress the symptoms”.

Two days later, the God-intoxicated carpenter uses the saw presented to him by the authorities to cut off the head of the prison chaplain. After that, “the chief warder seemed to have more influence with his superior than he had before. Sir Wilfred concentrated his attention upon the statistics, and the life of the prison was equitably conducted under the Standing Orders.”

Evelyn Waugh specialised in black comedy – and the London Bridge incident was, as I say, tragedy. But there is a read-across from one to the other which makes the 90-year-old novel worth re-reading.

I would make three points. One is that the search for redemption among prisoners is a profoundly good task, but the facts suggest that most criminals do not achieve it. (Or if they do, it is by the mercy of God, not through well-meaning courses.) So a certain caution is warranted.

The second is that the motivation of terrorist prisoners, especially those driven by a weird version of religious duty, is radically different from the motivation of what the Royal Ulster Constabulary used jokingly to call “ordinary, decent criminals”. They do not kill because it is convenient or fun or a way of earning money, but because they think it is right.

The third is that Islamist terrorism regards deceit as a legitimate weapon of jihad, whether in terms of propaganda, or of fooling kind people who want to help you, or of literally hiding a knife up your sleeve.

Confronted with such a deadly threat, our criminal justice system should confine its modern version of the Lucas-dockery Experiments to the pages of fiction where they belong.

Clive James was rightly mourned last week. I wish more attention had been paid to his excellent poem about climate-change alarmists. It ends thus:

Feverish talk of apocalypse might, by and by,

Die down, but the deep anguish will persist.

His death, and not the Earth’s, is the true fear

That motivates the doomsday fantasist:

There can be no world if he is not here.

In my lifetime, there have been three doomsday scenarios – nuclear holocaust, population explosion, now climate change. All three offer some rational basis for anxiety. But the hysteria about them is essentially self-centred, and beyond reason.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion