Why releasing prisoners early could be a victory for ‘sensible Starmer’

During his cabinet career in the Brexit deadlock years 2016 to 2019, David Gauke was the government’s voice of reason. Whenever there was a crisis – which was most days – the cry would go up: “Uncork the Gauke!” And he would be sent off to the TV and radio studios to pour his oil of calm rationality on troubled waters.

He was too reasonable for Boris Johnson, however, and ended up being expelled from the parliamentary Conservative Party because he thought leaving the EU without a deal was a bad idea and said so publicly. He lost his home counties seat, which he fought as an independent, and reinvented himself as a fine commentator on politics.

Now, the waters are troubled again – and the call for Gauke has gone out in a different part of the political forest. The Labour government has been forced into the unpopular policy of releasing prisoners early and needs some Conservative cover.

Shabana Mahmood, the new justice secretary, has asked Gauke, who was her predecessor in that job in 2018-19, to carry out a review of sentencing policy.

It is a clever appointment politically, because Gauke carries some cross-party weight as a former Tory justice secretary – even Tory Brexit sectarians regard him as a socialist or worse. But it is also the right appointment because Gauke knows what he is talking about, having wrestled with the problem of prison overcrowding during his time at the justice department.

It will, of course, be said that he is part of the problem, in that he failed to squeeze more money out of Philip Hammond’s Treasury, despite having been the number two minister in that department. Nor was Gauke at justice long enough to do anything about the increasingly long sentences that were filling up our prisons, apart from making a sceptical speech saying he didn’t think short sentences were effective in cutting crime.

But at least he had the right instinct and was concerned to back it up with evidence, although ultimately he didn’t do enough to pause the game of pass-the-parcel that finally ended with Alex Chalk handing the bomb over to Mahmood in July – just before it was about to go off.

Some Conservatives and their cheerleaders in the Tory press continue to insist that Labour has just made up the “£22bn black hole” in the public finances, despite the impartial Institute for Fiscal Studies confirming that the new government did inherit an unexpected in-year shortfall (whether it is as much as £22bn may be a more difficult question).

But there ought to be no doubt that the crisis in the prisons was handed over to the new government in an utterly irresponsible way. We know that Chalk pleaded with Rishi Sunak in the week before the prime minister called the election to order “SDS40” – the policy adopted by Mahmood a few weeks later to release some prisoners after 40 per cent of their sentence, instead of 50 per cent.

This makes the hypocrisy of Tory criticism of Mahmood for letting prisoners out early all the more brazen. Priti Patel, the former home secretary, called on Monday for the policy to be suspended until the government “put enhanced measures in to protect the public”. Presumably, those measures would include building a time machine to allow the Tories to build the extra prisons that should have been built.

Mahmood has a better idea, which is to try to add as much capacity as possible to the prison estate in the short term while tackling the underlying causes of the rise in the prison population. She has proved that she is surprisingly willing to rock the boat of collective cabinet responsibility by writing to Keir Starmer to appeal over Rachel Reeves’s head for a better funding settlement.

I do not know if she succeeded, but she strikes me as someone who will fight tenaciously to make the unanswerable case for more public spending on the criminal justice system. But, as she said in the Commons on Tuesday, “We cannot build our way out of this problem.”

At the same time as ensuring that there are enough prison places for criminals who need to be locked up, we do have to look at why we lock up so many people in this country. In England and Wales, 143 people per 100,000 are in prison. In the Netherlands, it is 65 and in Germany, 67.

I cannot believe that the British are twice as wicked as the Dutch and Germans, so I would conclude that there are a lot of people in our prisons who should not be there...

Let us uncork the Gauke and find out.