Has Ken Clarke just signed his own political death certificate? Whether you agree with
his liberal sentencing reforms or no’, there’s little doubting that the Justice Secretary has just stumbled quite emphatically on Radio 5. It looked bad enough for him when, discussing an idea to
cut the sentences of those who plead guilty to sex attacks, he blustered that, “No, I haven’t put this idea to women who’ve been raped because I haven’t met one recently.” But then it
turned even worse when a rape victim called in to describe her tragic case: she had been dragged through the courts for almost two years in search of justice, only for her attacker to plead guilty,
have his sentence cut, and then go on to reoffend. Through tears, she described Clarke’s proposal as “a disaster”.
It crystallises what is a tremendous problem for the Tories. Clarke may have been correct in his observation that there is little equivalence between “17-year-olds having [consensual]
intercourse with 15-year-olds” and what he called “forcible rape”, but his general policies do not chime with public sentiment. As Lord Ashcroft recently put it, in the booklet
accompanying his latest mega-poll of voters:
This is a deficiency that Labour have so far neglected to exploit under Ed Miliband — but that could change in PMQs shortly.
Comments