James Forsyth James Forsyth

Grayling goes Dutch

Chris Grayling’s speech tonight to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at KCL is an attempt to set out the intellectual underpinnings behind the Tories’ home affairs policies. To my mind, the two most interesting things in it are how Holland is influencing Grayling thinking and his reassertion of the Tory commitment to elected police commissioners.

To deal with the later first, there were murmurings in Westminster that Grayling was not keen on this idea which would transfer significant powers away from the Home Secretary. Indeed, word was that the leadership were becoming frustrated with Grayling’s failure to develop plans for how the implementation of this idea would work. But in this speech, Grayling is absolutely clear that elected police commissioners are a central plank of the Tory approach to dealing with crime. This is welcome news.

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