The old order changeth | 21 June 2008

Until his astonishing resignation from the Commons last week, the prospect of David Davis as the next Home Secretary was one of the foremost attractions of a new Conservative government. On a range of issues from prison policy and police bureaucracy to managed migration and juvenile crime, Mr Davis’s instincts have long been excellent.

Since David Cameron’s election as party leader in 2005, furthermore, he acted as a check on the occasional excesses of the Tory modernisers. The ‘decontamination of the Tory brand’ has been a necessary — and highly successful — process. When, from time to time, it veered towards folly, Mr Davis often saved the day, calming the nerves of anxious true-blue Conservatives: the Cameroons might want to ‘hug a hoodie’, but Mr Davis joked that he would prefer to ‘mug a hoodie’.

An experienced former minister and a fine chairman of the Public Accounts Committee from 1997 to 2001, he had the makings of an outstanding Home Secretary in a future Cameron administration. Now that he has forced and is contesting the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, there seems little chance that he will fill a great office of state.

While we have always admired Mr Davis’s boldness, it has not served him well — or logically — in this instance. Leave aside the accusations of untamed egoism: most politicians suffer to a greater or lesser degree from this character trait. Our objection is that Mr Davis’s actions make little sense.

The proximate cause of his resignation was the knife-edge vote on extending the maximum period for detaining terror suspects without charge to 42 days. Mr Davis complains that Gordon Brown ‘bribed and bullied MPs into voting to extend the power’. No doubt: but it is hard to take seriously this complaint from a former government whip of the Maastricht era, whose legendary toughness with recalcitrants led his colleague, Gyles Brandreth, to nickname him ‘DD of the SS’.