Politics

There is a scene in the film Reservoir Dogs where three gangsters are pointing guns at each other and one suggests they should put down their weapons and ‘settle this with a conversation’. Instead the trio create the ultimate bloodbath by all pulling their triggers. The absence of trust can do that to people. Just look at the goings on in the Conservative parliamentary party this week. Not content with spraying reputational ketchup over Rishi Sunak by trashing his Rwanda Bill as a mendacious con job which he must know won’t work, the Tory right has gone on to shred its own credibility by, in the main, tamely assenting to

In voting through the government’s Rwanda Bill, Conservative MPs have made a declaration: they want to reduce illegal immigration but they don’t want to take any of the hard choices required to do so. The final version of the Bill is the worst of both worlds, tailored to the sensitivities of the Tory left and yet still wide open to legal challenge. The chances that anything more than a token number of illegal immigrants are transferred to Rwanda between now and the election, whenever that is, are extremely slim. Those who faithfully parrot the Number 10 line will regard the Bill’s passage as a political victory for Rishi Sunak. He

In prison, I met a lot of men who said they shouldn’t be there. They presented detailed mitigations, and listed all the flaws in the prosecution’s evidence. The truth is though, that most of us had been sentenced for crimes we’d committed. There were very few men inside who shouldn’t have been there. Mark, though, did not belong in prison. I first met Mark in HMP Wandsworth when he became my fourth cellmate. He was a quiet lad, with dark floppy hair which he hid behind, avoiding my gaze. It didn’t take long to realise something was very wrong with him. We watched the news; we watched the soaps: Mark