As David Lammy is discovering, the doctrine of ministerial accountability is a cruel one. The ministerial code – the nearest thing we have in this respect to a written constitution – is clear. It states: “Ministers have a duty to parliament to account, and be held to account, for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and agencies.”
Or, in plainer terms: “The buck stops with you, minister.”
It’s fair to say that, however beleaguered he feels and however woeful the state of the system he inherited undoubtedly still is, Mr Lammy has not demonstrated a firm grip on his brief, nor shown the accountability someone in his exalted, tricorned position – secretary of state for justice, lord chancellor and deputy prime minister – is expected to demonstrate.
Mr Lammy has, in short, allowed too many dangerous people who should be in prison for serious crimes to be out on the streets. It is not something the public finds easy to accept or even understand, and that is why Mr Lammy finds himself in such a perilous political place. What is more, his mishaps have only added to the impression of a government that can’t seem to get through a week without some scandal or catastrophe sending its popularity to explore fresh Stygian depths.
When Sir Keir Starmer was leader of the opposition, he told the country to give him a mandate so that the “grown-ups” could take over and show how government can and should be run – effective, efficient, with the utmost integrity, and with a boost to economic growth thrown in. The voters may well ask, in the popular phrase: “How’s that going, prime minister?”
The first accidental release to torment Mr Lammy, nominally in charge of His Majesty’s prisons, came when the sex offender Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker housed in an Epping hotel, was shooed away from Chelmsford prison to spend a few days of freedom in London. At that point, Mr Lammy pledged that the “strongest release checks that have ever taken place” would be implemented to prevent further errors.
Hardly had those over-ambitious words dropped from Mr Lammy’s lips than it was widely reported that two more criminals had been wrongly let out – Billy Smith, 35, who was jailed for fraud on Monday but released by mistake the same day; and Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, a 24-year-old registered sex offender originally from Algeria who had been serving an 18-month community order.
As Lady Bracknell didn’t quite say, to allow one dangerous, illegal migrant sex offender to be mistakenly released may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both, plus a convicted fraudster, looks like carelessness. Mr Smith has been good enough to hand himself back in, but the other “should-be” convict is still at large. How Mr Lammy must dread getting updates from the head of the Prison Service.
Mr Lammy and his defenders plead that mistaken releases have been a fact of penal life since crime was invented, and that plenty had been let out by Tory ministers, including his restless shadow, Robert Jenrick. It is also undeniable – Mr Jenrick concedes the point – that the Conservative administration didn’t build enough new prisons and provide enough spaces to accommodate their taste for locking up offenders. The “human errors” responsible for recent blunders have indeed been exacerbated by an underfunded, overcrowded, chaotic system overly reliant on paper records.
Yet, for all that, the ministerial code and political reality are clear: Mr Lammy and his colleagues are responsible for what happens on their watch.
The number of accidental releases has increased in the past year or so, and seems linked to the early release programme instituted by Mr Lammy’s immediate predecessor, Shabana Mahmood. Of course, those emergency measures had to be taken because the system was left in near collapse. But, nonetheless, the safeguards were not adequate to prevent even more accidental releases than previously.
More unfortunately, Mr Lammy is solely culpable for his behaviour in the House of Commons, standing in for the prime minister at PMQs. Here again, Mr Lammy failed to live up to the ministerial code, as redrafted and strengthened by Sir Keir himself.
The code imposes a duty of “candour and openness” on ministers, who “should be as open as possible with parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest”. We now know that Mr Lammy knew before he appeared at the despatch box that another sex offender had been released. When asked about it by his Conservative opponent, James Cartlidge, he stonewalled and, ironically enough, told Mr Cartlidge to “get a grip”.
Certainly, Mr Lammy spotted and avoided the Tories’ obvious and near-perfect parliamentary trap (although the offender wasn’t an asylum seeker, as Mr Cartlidge said, having entered the UK legally on a visa which he then overstayed). But there was no obvious reason, aside from embarrassment, why Mr Lammy should not at that point have simply set out the facts.
He contended that he was “not equipped with all of the detail” during PMQs to tell MPs about the latest prisoner released in error: “I took the judgement that it is important when updating the House and the country about serious matters like this that you have all the detail. The danger is you end up misleading the House and general public. That is the judgement I took, I think it is the right judgement,” he said.
And yet the Metropolitan Police had no objection to the escapee being named. The fact that Mr Lammy forgot to attach his poppy to his new suit is one of the lesser mistakes he’s committed in recent days.
David Lammy will survive this particular scandal, mere weeks after he was made deputy prime minister, replacing Angela Rayner, who had had to resign, but if he wants to avoid a similar ignominious fall from grace, he will need to fix the system that is letting the country down – and fast.
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