Diary – 1 May 2004

Washington

Not since Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership has any book of political reportage caused as much of a stir on either side of the Atlantic as Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller Plan of Attack. In the last few days I have listened to detailed dissections of the gospel according to Woodward. I have discussed his book in the West Wing of the White House, at student seminars at Georgetown University, during dinner with my fellow columnists of the American Spectator and at the hospitable home of its editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. I even had a conversation about Woodward in a place where his fierce anti-war opponents would no doubt like to see President George W. Bush — a high-security Texas prison.

Political discussion was not, though, the point of the prison visit. On Easter Sunday, my wife Elizabeth and I accompanied my biographical subject, Charles Colson, to the death row of a women’s jail. It was his 27th consecutive Easter of preaching in prison. ‘There is nowhere I would rather be on this day than in these tombs of modern society,’ said Colson. I agree with him. We ex-offenders (Colson was jailed for seven months in 1974 for Watergate offences committed in the White House) who return to incarceration to work in prison ministry can sometimes tune in to an almost mystical wavelength with men and women still serving their time. On the first occasion that I shared preaching duties with Colson, at Parchman State Penitentiary, a notorious jail in the Deep South, I was scared stiff not of the prisoners but that my Eton and Oxford accent might be incomprehensible in darkest Mississippi. I needn’t have worried. I deployed the opening line I use in British prisons, ‘I have been where you are now’ and immediately there was pin-drop silence, rapt attention and even friendly laughter at my corny in-jokes.