The justice secretary personally invited the new chief inspectors of prisons, and probation, to apply for their jobs before they were advertised, MPs have been told.
Michael Gove rang the former Scotland Yard head of counter-terrorism Peter Clarke and the former head of Ofqual Glenys Stacey to see if they were interested in taking on the important watchdog roles in the criminal justice system.
Both posts have a recent history of controversy, with the previous justice secretary, Chris Grayling, refusing to extend the contract of the current chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, after he robustly criticised policy failures. A former chief inspector of probation had to step down following a conflict of interest row, after it was revealed his wife ran a private probation company.
The approach by Gove to his two nominated candidates before the posts were advertised emerged during a pre-appointment scrutiny hearing held by the justice select committee on Tuesday. Both had worked professionally with Gove during his time as education secretary, with Clarke carrying out an investigation at his request into the Trojan horse allegations of Islamist infiltration in Birmingham schools.
Stacey told MPs that she had been surprised to receive the call from Gove at home one evening, asking if she might be interested in applying for the job. Stacey was in the process of standing down from her role at the exams regulator, during which she had worked with Gove. Clarke told MPs he had received a similar call after the election. He said the justice secretary told him the post would be advertised shortly and stressed that it would be decided by open competition.
But Clarke, who admitted he had not visited any prisons in the past nine years, insisted that he would be robustly independent in his new role. “I will not shy away from disagreeing with anyone and I will speak ‘truth unto power’. I will be robust,” he said. Clarke told MPs that when Gove asked him to investigate extremism in schools in Birmingham, he regarded his role as completely independent and did not hold back from publicly criticising the Department for Education in his report.
He also said that in his role as head of counter-terrorism, he had to carry out evidence-based investigations and doing so had, on one occasion, included resisting “significant pressure from an overseas government”. Most of Clarke’s career was spent in the Metropolitan police, including a period as divisional commander in Brixton in the 1990s, head of the royal and diplomatic protection squad at the time of the death of Princess Diana, and head of counter-terrorism command at the time of 7 July terror attacks on London.
Since his retirement, Clarke has had his own security consultancy, which has provided security advice for the Olympic Games and nuclear installations. He told MPs that the main issues in prisons appeared to be curbing the smuggling of contraband, including illegal drugs, overcrowding and the replacement of ageing Victorian prisons with new jails. He said he felt “instinctively uncomfortable” Britain was the only country that had indefinite detention in immigration cases.
Stacey said she had some background in the criminal justice system, having previously been chief executive of the criminal cases review commission and of the Greater Manchester magistrates courts committee. Her husband was a senior figure in the Crown Prosecution Service.
