Last week Prisons Minister Rory Stewart vowed to quit his job if he didn’t oversee specific improvements in a group of struggling prisons. ‘I believe in the prison service,’ he said. ‘I believe in our prison officers. I believe that this can be turned around and I want you to judge me on those results and I will resign if I don’t succeed.’
This pledge sounded both refreshing and naive – unless, of course, Stewart had some more exciting plans for what he’d like to do in 12 months’ time (or he was expecting to be reshuffled before this). It’s rare that ministers take responsibility for failures on their watch. But the Ministry of Justice has come to be regarded in Whitehall as a basket-case department, with policies that crumble almost as visibly as the prisons it oversees. Of all the portfolios to try to promise success in, the justice one must surely be the hardest.
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