JACK OF ALL TIRADES

Our busy Home Secretary grants another

interview, and Anne MeElvoy discovers

what gets his goat

JACK STRAW is the New Labourite that a certain breed of stout Tory secretly admires. He's smart in a grey sort of way, fills the prisons with the same guilt-free zeal as Michael Howard did, and marches his own son down. to the police station when the boy goes through a druggy phase.

So there's Maximum Jack. But then there's Radical Jack too. Maximum Jack wants your kids under curfew by nine and will lop off parts of your right to trial by jury as soon as look at you. Radical Jack will be beavering away on ethnic-minority quotas or redefining racial crime.

Not that it's been a great week for the Home Secretary's improving causes with senior figures from the ethnic minorities berating Labour for playing the race card. But Straw is bullish. 'I refuse to accept the line that the Tories and Labour are a kind of Tweedledum and Tweediedee here. There is no equivalence. Labour and the Lib Dems have an OK record on race. The Tories are more divided. They have a right-wing element with some very reprehensible views. Their own shadow chancellor and the heir apparent comes out with a different line.'

Is he saying that Michael Portillo has 'reprehensible views' because he refused to sign the Commission for Racial Equality document? 'I don't consider Portillo at all racist. But I can't see why someone wouldn't sign it. It struck me as uncontroversial.'

His own attempts to spread racial harmony have not been exactly untroubled. In the trial of two Leeds United players, Mr Justice Poole threw out the Macpherson recommendations on alleged racist motives in crimes. Since then we've seen the charge of racially aggravated assault applied to a playground spat, while the police in Bradford decided that fighting between white and Asian groups last week did not fall within the category.

Macpherson's definition — 'a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person' — looks, in practice, highly unreliable. And shouldn't justice be colour-blind? 'No,' says the Home Secretary. 'Justice can't be colour-blind because some crime is racially motivated and that has to be recognised. Colour can be a crucial factor.' He con cedes that there 'may be distortions at the margins' and wavers significantly on one point: 'If other people have alternative definitions [to Macpherson's] they think would work better, then we will look at them.'

Out of office, Radical Jack was intent on shrinking the monarchy. In a 1994 Fabian pamphlet, he called for a slimmed-down royal family 'of five to six members'. In the wake of Sophie's faux pas, shouldn't the Firm have taken his advice to downsize rather earlier? A roar of self-conscious laughter follows. 'That is an interesting subject. But I have nothing to add to the debate right now.' Is he a republican who has come round to the monarchist position? 'Er, I don't think so.' So he's never been a republican? 'I don't think I have, though I can't say exactly what I thought when I was ten or 15.' If anyone does recall Jack being a republican at any point out of short trousers, could they please let us know?

He's itching to talk about asylum, because the message the government needs to spread is that it is under control, but the polls show the Tories making the running on an uncomfortable subject. For the rise in figures during Labour's first term in office, he blames the Tories' computer system, his predecessor's freeze on recruitment for case-workers and the 'complete chaos' bequeathed him in the welfare-support system.

Four years is a long time to keep blaming the old lags. And the public isn't convinced, which is the government's real problem. 'The public are rightly ambiguous,' he concedes. 'They are proud of our tradition of providing asylum but they don't like the criminal gangs and the facilitators. We are dealing with it in a practical and humane way.'

One of his close allies points out that he is a mixture of the two people he worked for as a rising politician — Peter Shore and Barbara Castle, From Shore he acquired a minute attention to detail. From Castle he acquired the habit of sudden, unscheduled, wild pronouncements on whatever is getting his goat.

The goat is finally got when I mention the UK's high prison population and the fears of liberal reformers that the Blair years are passing without our jails growing any more humane or effective at rehabilitation. The UK has one of the highest prison populations in Europe. 'I'm not happy to see that level or even a rise in it. But I'm not unhappy either. It's a function of the level of criminality.' Why do we commit so much crime, then? 'It doubled under the Tories.'

What about the people on his own side who object to his penal policies? He dismisses them as 'one or two people who live in a dream world about what it's like to live next door to a persistent offender'. It's a sudden, harsh shaft of Maximum Jack's thinking. 'There are 65,000 people inside who do not want to be there,' he adds. 'Manipulative, difficult people, many with no idea of right and wrong. You can't let them racket around.'

Do the 'dreamers' of better ways include Sir David Ramsbotham, the chief inspector of prisons, who recently railed against Straw for tolerating inhuman conditions in jails? 'He has a very specific brief — the welfare of prisoners,' Straw says coolly. I point out that the number of young offenders in prison has jumped sharply, by some 400 in the last year, a statistic to make penal reformers despair. 'What I'm worried about is the number of young people involved in crime, not the number in prison,' is the crisp reply. 'When people got fixated on reducing the prison population as a prime policy goal, grave errors were made.'

He's spent the first Labour term as a big beast roaming the New Labour plain. But going where exactly? David Blunkett has already booked the removal men for the change from Education to the Home Office, and Straw may be headed for the streamlined Transport and Environment billet, one of the toughest portfolios of the second term. For a while, that is. A cautious opponent of Emu entry, he might well end up as foreign secretary, should Tony Blair resolve his Euro-dithering on the sceptical side. 'I'm haying French lessons every week,' he says elliptically. A brief look of devilment shoots across his even features. 'And I can sing "Ja, wir haben Iceine Bananen" in German too.'

Anne McEivoy is associate editor of the Independent.