SMT Online Editor's View: Time to go Home, Jacqui

09 Jun 09

Messrs Blair and Brown have certainly picked some choice Home Secretaries over the years, haven’t they? A series of individuals who, if dropped into a BBC Radio recording studio, could make a fair stab at recreating The Goon Show. Only it wouldn’t be quite so funny.

Remember David Blunkett and his unhealthy obsession with PCSOs? Who could ever forget it? Not to mention said politician’s regular attempts to destabilise Sir John Stevens when the latter was Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Still, you can’t beat a bloke in a luminous vest if you need to find out where the nearest lavatory happens to be. Whether or not that’s a good use of your taxes is a matter of personal opinion. I say it isn’t.

Oh, and who cannot fail to recall the numerous blunders presided over by Charles Clarke (most notably the immigration debacle)?

We should have known old Charles was doomed to failure when he failed to spot the fact that in-house security personnel ought to be licensed.

The embarrassment of his resignation must still haunt him to this day, so too the unseemly rows over foreign prisoners and, indeed, our overcrowded penitentiaries.

Then we were forced to endure Dr John Reid who, like many of his predecessors, talked a good game while consistently failing to deliver. Credit where credit’s due, though.

The rather dour, Celtic-supporting Scot did take time out to establish the Ministry of Justice and confront head-on the management of prisons, Courts, offenders and basic criminal justice issues.

Pity the Doc didn’t sort out the Judges, though, many of whom are so reluctant to come down hard on miscreants that sentencing has now become a joke to be sniffed at by scrawny youths and hardened criminals alike.

The 24-month ‘Reign of Pain’

Most recently, of course, we’ve all had to sit and marvel at the 24-month fiasco that has been Jacqui Smith’s ‘Reign of Pain’.

The day after the 46-year-old MP for Redditch in the beautiful county of Worcestershire took office on 28 June 2007, there were two failed Islamist car bomb attacks in the capital.

The horrendous incident at Glasgow International Airport – which, thank God, I missed by about half an hour – swiftly followed on 30 June.

Neither of these occurrences were due to the Home Secretary, of course (although one might surmise, as did several prominent national media journalists at the time, that the swift changeover from Reid to Smith offered the perfect ‘window of opportunity’ for all the nutters to crawl out from under their grubby stones).

The Malvern-born graduate of Hertford College, Oxford barely had time to begin absorbing the scale of the brief – let alone meet all of her top civil servants – when she found herself having to tell the public how she was overseeing the Metropolitan and Strathclyde Police Services’ massive manhunts for the perpetrators.

There was also the not-inconsequential matter of having to chair the Government’s Cobra Emergency Planning Committee and work out what was to be done.

No easy task, admittedly, but it must be said that the tough, no-nonsense reputation Ms Smith coveted in her former guise of Chief Whip seemed to vanish in the haze.

Smith was praised for the cool and steadfast manner in which she approached the situation unfolding before her seemingly glazed eyes. Yes indeed. A rabbit caught in the headlights was how I remember it, too.

Pre-defined role for the Home Secretary

Given Dr Reid’s legacy, and the fact that he’d famously dubbed elements of the Home Office “not fit for purpose”, Smith’s new role in Cabinet was pretty much defined for her.

There was to be an exclusive focus on not just terrorism and national security but also immigration, identity issues and, of course, policing.

Speaking of which, didn’t our Jacqui make a great start there, ladies and gentlemen? Barely six months in post, Ms Smith thought she’d go one better than Blunkett (who only managed to hack off one copper, albeit the top guy) by single-handedly alienating tens of thousands of rank-and-file police officers as a result of appearing to deliberately pick a fight over pay.

In truth, the Home Secretary turned her back on a deal recommended by the independent salary body that the Government itself had established. What a joke.

Many of you ex-Job types will know that, for the last 90 years, members of the police service have been banned from striking. Here, we had a situation where officers began openly talking about having that legal bar removed.

In the end, more than 20,000 of them marched through the streets of London in vein-pumping, red-faced anger. Round of applause for the Home Secretary, please…

Not surprisingly, Jan Berry – one time head of the Police Federation, which represents those ordinary constables – verbally attacked Smith at the Federation’s next National Conference.

Berry opined that the decision not to honour the pay award was a breach of faith, a monumental mistake and a betrayal of the police service. Ms Smith’s decision represented all of those things and much more besides.

What a sorry mess the Home Office was in back then. I remember it well, and it’s no better now.

The 42 days’ detention furore

Cast your mind back, if you will, to this time last year, and the furore that erupted over the 42 days’ detention lobbyists.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair had, of course, once tried in vain to ramp up the detention of terror suspects without charge to 60 days before settling – after a pretty humiliating House of Commons defeat – for an extension to 28 days.

The new ‘Dream Ticket’ of Brown and Smith pushed for 42 days of pre-charge detention periods for suspected terrorists, arguing that the police needed ‘exceptional powers for exceptional threats’.

I happened to believe they were right in fighting for this but, while the legislation scraped through the Commons by just nine votes, those playful old sorts in the Lords conspired to inflict an enormous defeat on the plans.

Must have been a real struggle ungluing themselves from their chairs in the opulent Tea Room to go and vote, one suspects.

Nice of them to wake up for the occasion, though, and break free from the onerous task of having to entertain their grandchildren or an overseas luminary for a second or two.

That defeat most certainly damaged Smith’s credibility, authority and confidence – not to mention the Prime Minister’s – and, sadly, the duo decided not to press on with their agenda. In my view, an opportunity lost.

Sir Ian Blair stands down

Then, in October last year, Sir Ian Blair decided to quit office as the country’s leading policeman.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s resignation was, for the most part anyway, as shambolic an episode as pretty much his entire time in the hot seat.

Yes, the Labour ministers warmed to Blair due to his willingness for police reform and modernisation but, in the main, I would suggest their backing was down to Sir Ian’s “astute political skills”.

In plain English, Blair was apparently happy to be firmly entrenched in the other Blair’s pocket.

Ms Smith stood by her man over the tragic slaying of Jean Charles de Menezes, even though there was enormous pressure being placed on Sir Ian to go.

London Mayor Boris Johnson eventually accounted for the hapless chief, of course, and did so with breathtaking political speed even though he really had no mandate. Despite the hair-don’t, you have to admire Boris for sheer bravado.

Everything really began to go belly up, however, when the Metropolitan Police Service took it upon itself to arrest Conservative front-bencher Damian Green, who’d become a serious source of embarrassment to the Home Office.

As the story unfolded, it became clear Green’s only crime was to have done his job properly, but then again that sort of conduct has always been frowned upon by this Government. “Bring out Big Brother. He’ll sort it out.”

How Ms Smith managed to keep a straight face in front of the media and the Opposition in the Commons when denying all knowledge of the Met’s investigation into Green’s conduct I’ll never know.

“The systematic leaking of information is damaging the integrity of the civil service,” commented Jacqui at the time.

The civil servants underpinning the Labour Party have damaged their own integrity by dint of the huge amount of tosh they’ve served up, thank you very much.

Mightily surprising that they’ve failed to eat any humble pie for pudding, though, is it not?

One of several errors of judgement

Either way, a whole host of Parliamentary colleagues were disgusted by Smith’s refusal to condemn Green’s arrest (and I can’t say that I disagree with them in the slightest). The MPs’ anger merely worsened in April when all charges against the Tory were dropped like a stone.

Surely by now the noose was tightening around Smith’s Adam’s Apple? Mind you, some of her actions – and those of her colleagues – would suggest a brass neck for all.

Remember, too, Ms Smith stressing only recently that Hazel Blears’ departure – Blears being one of many ministers now hastily jumping from the sinking ship – would be “a big loss to the Government”.

What? You must be joking there, Jacqui? That truly is the funniest one-liner I’ve heard all year!

Although, like many of her predecessors, Smith’s time in Cabinet has been dogged by one policy battle after another and one scandal on top of another, strange that her demise wasn’t brought about by anything centrally connected to the task at hand.

No. The disastrous days of October 2008 – when Ms Smith unceremoniously lost both her key anti-terror measure and the Metropolitan Police Service Commissioner – did not seal her fate.

Rather, it was the revelations about her expenses claims that led her to conclude it was “the right thing for her family” if she were to stand down.

Squalid mess arising from the expenses

Smith was the first minister to hit the headlines in relation to the MPs’ extraordinary expenses claims, and look at the squalid mess that has since been uncovered.

The Home Secretary begrudgingly apologised to the nation for “mistakenly” claiming £10 second home allowances on her husband (and appointed Parliamentary assistant) Richard Timney’s ordering of adult films for private viewing at their constituency home in Redditch.

Other items on which monies were claimed from Joe Public’s pay packet included a flat screen TV, scatter cushions, a £40 barbecue and even a bathplug. They’re all core essentials for performing the ministerial brief, aren’t they? Beggars belief, doesn’t it?

That’s on top of an ongoing investigation by Parliamentary Standards Commissioner John Lyon into claims worth £116,000 for said Redditch bolt-hole, which Smith asserts to be her second residence.

The Home Secretary argued – pretty unconvincingly, if truth be told – that her main home (and where she spends most nights) is her sister’s house in London which she shares during the week.

Rising through the political ranks

Before being elected to Parliament, Ms Smith served as head of economics at Haybridge High School in Hagley, and was also a councillor.

One of the incoming ‘Blair babes’, Smith was pictured with her (then) leader in the headily optimistic days following Labour’s 1997 General Election victory when we were all told that “things can only get better”. Yeah, right.

A keen supporter of Blair’s modernisation agenda, Smith’s rise within Government was rapid. She became a junior education minister within two years of entering Parliament, a minister of state at the Department of Health after the 2001 General Election and, in the June 2003 reshuffle, was made a Department of Trade and Industry minister before eventually becoming deputy minister for women.

In May 2005, Smith was appointed schools minister, and then assumed the role of Chief Whip in May 2006. During this period, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson said she had been incredibly effective in “making peace between the warring Blair and Brown factions”.

Focusing on the constituents

Last week, Jacqui Smith told the voracious media that she was standing down to focus on her constituents, and to repay the support her family has given her.

Sounds a bit like Hazel Blears’ reasons, in fact, only our Jacqui didn’t want to ridicule herself by wafting any cheques on camera and pretending to come over all: “I’m giving this money back because I know I shouldn’t have made use of it it in the first place.”

Smith asserts that she has only been able to do the job of Home Secretary due to her family’s support, and it’s because they’ve come under so much pressure and strain in the row over her expenses that she decided to quit.

Speaking to BBC News, Smith commented: “I spoke to the Prime Minister about the fact that I’ve been a minister for nearly ten years now. During that time, I’ve been able to do the job, I hope, to the best of my abilities because of the support that has been provided to me by my family.

“Stepping down is the right thing to do for me, for them and for my constituency. I’ll now be able to put the focus back on to my constituents in Redditch. They’re the reason why I’m in this job in the first place.”

It’s understood that Ms Smith intends to defend her Redditch seat at the next election, where she presently ‘enjoys’ a pretty slender majority of 2,716.

However, the group running the ‘Jacqui Must Go Now!’ Campaign feel the people of Redditch no longer wish to be governed by her, and suggest she must stand down from public life altogether in the wake of the expenses revelations.

Thus far, the campaigners have gathered 1,180 signatures calling for Smith to go. One constituent said: “If any ordinary person had behaved as so many politicians seem to have done in regard to their expenses, the simple truth of the matter is that they would have been arrested and charged.” Too bloody right they would.

Taking a bow in the House of Commons

The Home Secretary made her final appearance in the Commons last week, dressed in a plain but striking black and white suit.

The debate was all about the Home Office’s latest Immigration Bill, the very subject matter that led Charles Clarke to his downfall. There was also talk of future plans when there plainly was (and is) no foreseeable future for our present lords and masters.

Plenty of smoke and mirrors again but, like much of what had gone before within and without the Home Office during Smith’s reign, precious little in the way of substantial delivery.

It’s fair to say that, within political and Government circles, Jacqui Smith will be remembered by her peers as a pretty calm and, in the main, personable Home Secretary who undeniably worked hard to introduce policies that would improve the immigration system, increase counter-terrorism measures and enhance national security.

Whether or not those policies have worked in the real world is a matter for conjecture.

Taking forward the legacy of Dr John Reid, Ms Smith invested a good deal of time in looking for ways in which she could improve our confidence in the criminal justice system. Wrapped up in all of that would be the new local policing pledges still to come to fruition.

Judging by the numerous instances of gun and knife crime still blighting our streets, the prevalence of serious assaults and muggings and the still-weak sentencing from our Judges, I doubt that many would say success has been achieved in this particular area.

One step forward, two steps back

For every step forward there appears to have been two steps back. What about all of the policy miscalculations? Most notably, that came home to roost relatively recently in relation to UK settlement rights for the Gurkhas.

Smith neatly deflected derision by allowing immigration minister Phil Woolas to do the talking on her behalf. Maybe she’d absorbed some PR advice from Lord Mandelson.

Smith, of course, is also the politician tainted for being the one to really push national ID cards. That line of thinking has provoked furious opposition not just from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but also certain members of the Labour Party itself.

One thing you don’t want to do as a Government minister is alienate the people who are lining up behind you.

Instead of being remembered as a great Home Secretary, I fear Jacqui Smith will go down in history as the politician who claimed for a barbecue, a dodgy DVD or two and a bathplug.

Either way, it wasn’t before time that said plug was pulled on her tenure.

What’s the new guy going to do?

Into Ms Smith’s place steps Alan Johnson. Can we expect a different approach from him?

Will the former postman be able to deliver, most notably in relation to a police service wherein many chief constables are viewed as a law unto themselves and being patched through to your local station these days is about as easy as flying to the moon without benefit of Space Shuttle?

Johnson’s Trade Union background will ensure loyalty to the Prime Minister, but how long does Brown have left in office anyway?

There have been so many Sheffield Steel blades in evidence around Westminster these past few days as to warrant the filming of Kill Bill Volume 3.

The Labour MP for West Hull and Hessle and former Secretary of State for Health, Johnson will be proactive. There’s little doubt about that. He’ll want to see police out on the beat again, which is no bad thing in my view.

In an interview with the BBC, Johnson stated that it’s “an honour and a privilege” to become the Home Secretary. “It’s one of the three top posts aside from being Prime Minister,” said Johnson, who – to his great credit – stands as one of the few MPs not implicated in the expenses scandal.

“At the Home Office, I’ll be working with top people in the police and security sectors who are doing a great job.”

Johnson is making all the right noises. He’s being bullish about wanting to take knives off the streets and forge greater social cohesion in our communities.

Both laudable objectives, but then he blots his copybook by suggesting that any analysis of Jacqui Smith’s period in office would show “enormous improvements” and “some really great achievements”.

You might be smooth, Alan, but that’s stretching credibility just a tad too far.

Support for an ailing Prime Minister

In backing Gordon Brown to the hilt to carry on as Prime Minister, Johnson also said – almost in the same breath – that he would “never say never” to becoming Top Dog himself at some point.

Mind you, Johnson’s insistent he can see “no circumstances at present” where he might mount a challenge for the leadership.

All of this talk is going to be redundant, of course, if the Conservatives shock the lot of us by making a decent fist of campaigning in front of the next General Election. Let’s face it, if they lose this one then there’s just no hope for Cameron and Co.

Interestingly, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has provided some very telling pointers as to what he would do if ensconced at the Home Office.

Ever since Cameron appointed him, Grayling has been extremely vocal on the “politicised” senior police officers whom he feels have become far too closely aligned with Labour.

The Conservative view is that Sir Ian Blair, for example, was but the latest and best known of a generation of senior officers to have gained promotion on the back of apparently supporting the Labour mandate.

Continuing the theme, Grayling has vowed to end the privileged role that chief constables seemingly enjoy when helping to decide on the country’s law and order policy.

ACPO has long been part of a formal ‘tripartite’ system that also includes Home Office ministers and officials of elected police authorities. Grayling’s determined to confine that structure to history.

Crime as it affects the individual

46-year-old Grayling, the Conservative MP for Epsom and Ewell, wants to see what he terms “abstract civil liberties issues” lower on the party’s political agenda.

His priority? “Crime as it affects the individual, and fighting that crime and anti-social behaviour in communities and in our streets.” I don’t think any of us would baulk at that.

One area in which Grayling really hits the nail on the head as far as I’m concerned is when he begins to talk of “ending the madness where, all too often, the victim of a crime can become the police suspect”.

Grayling commented: “If a householder leaves their premises to go and challenge a group of unruly youths who are outside disturbing the peace, very often it’s that householder who’ll end up in a police cell and not the louts that caused the trouble.”

For Grayling, Jacqui Smith was a “do nothing” Home Secretary who, when she did do something, merely added to more than 60 separate Criminal Justice Acts that have appeared during the 2000s.

“Put simply, we’ve created a paradise for lawyers,” asserted Grayling. “Surely we can come up with a system that’s simple to understand and simple to implement? A system where there are clear consequences for stepping outside of the law?”

If you want to take on that task, Chris, then be my guest. My God somebody needs to, and pretty damn fast at that.

Until next time.

Get the latest stories first with info4security's newsletters: Click to signup

Post and bookmark this story at the following sites:

What is this?

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit	Google	Newsvine