POLITICS
Derek Lewis: big job, little man, inaccurate book
BRUCE ANDERSON
If a book were to be written on declining standards in British public life during recent decades, Derek Lewis would deserve a chapter to himself. Mr Lewis was entitled to defend his record as director-general of the prison service, and he could have done so by making a serious, dignified contribution to the debate on penal policy. Instead, he has produced a bitter little book (Hidden Agen- das, Hamish Hamilton, £20), as superficial as it is spiteful, and full of inaccuracies.
The worst of these concerns Michael Howard's wife, Sandra. According to Mr Lewis, while a new code of prison standards was being prepared: 'One of [Mr Howard's] special advisers, David Cameron . . . asked to see me in private . . . looking a bit sheep- ish, Cameron mentioned that . . . Sandra . . . thought that the code's prescription of a balanced and nutritious diet was giving today's offenders much more than they deserved.'
To those who know Mrs Howard and Mr Cameron, that account was immediately implausible. Sandra Howard is no more likely to play the Beadle in Oliver Twist than David Cameron is to sound sheepish. If Mrs Howard had attempted to influence the diet of prisoners, it would have been in the direction of greater liberality. She made no such attempt.
David Cameron, however, did. In his opinion, the early drafts of the code of standards went into far too much detail about prison catering. Mr Cameron pro- posed a tighter draft, in which it was simply stated that prisoners were entitled to a healthy and balanced diet. Mr Lewis responded enthusiastically, adopted most of Mr Cameron's changes, and sent a minute to the Home Secretary in which he thanked Mr Cameron for his valuable con- tribution. 'Changes were made,' Mr Lewis tells us, after the passage in which he invents false opinions for Mrs Howard, 'but the balanced diet had to stay.' The phrase `balanced diet' came from David Cameron.
Mr Lewis makes the absurd claim that deputy secretaries in Whitehall never speak to permanent secretaries or to under-secre- taries (whom he confuses with assistant sec- retaries). He also maligns individual civil servants, especially the Home Secretary's former private secretary, Joan Mac- Naughton. Mr Lewis accuses her of enjoy- ing 'power a little too much', of 'making a virtue out of stress and hostility' and of being too tough on her underlings. Others give a wholly different account. They describe an outstanding civil servant, who demanded high standards from her staff, but who also led by example. She probably did not share Michael Howard's views; he once said that working for him was the supreme test of her civil service professional- ism. But she never let her own opinions impede the performance of her duties, and won the admiration of several men who are not easily impressed.
She does, however, have one deficiency, which wrecked her relationship with Derek Lewis. She is hopeless when it comes to massaging vain men's egos — and they do not come any vainer than Mr Lewis's. The book is full of the most trivial details of his daily life: how he got from a to b, where he slept, who paid for lunch, or, in the case of Stephen Tumim, the chief inspector of pris- ons, who never paid. To judge by this book, Mr Lewis was far more interested in fussing over late taxis than he was in hard thinking about the tasks he faced.
They were formidable tasks. By the 1980s, the prison service was in need of comprehensive reform. There was an utter confusion of objectives. Most Home Office officials espoused a penological liberalism which was doubly woolly, taking as little account of the problems of law and order as it did of actual conditions in prison; slop- py thinking on the one hand, slopping out on the other.
In many prisons, the governors had little control. The Prison Officers' Association (POA) — the last Scargillite trade union effectively controlled them, often in a coali- tion with the prisoners themselves. Although there were very few prisons where the staff would buy lobsters for the inmates, there were many gaols in which the POA and the inmates had come to a tacit understanding that as long as the pris- oners did not make conspicuous trouble, the warders would make no serious attempt to crack down on drugs. Derek Lewis sneers at Lord Ferrers for asking why pris- ons should not become drug-free zones. But Robin Ferrers was absolutely right: the attempt should at least be made. As Mr Lewis was himself to discover, if security is so lax that it is easy for prisoners to obtain drugs, it will not be that hard for them to procure escape equipment, or even guns.
Michael Howard insisted that security must be the prison service's overriding objective; there had been far too InaW escapes. He also set out to prevent the prison service creating expensive accom0" dation more appropriate to a university hall of residence than to a prison. Mr Howard was equally determined to ensure than Os" ons were run by governors and not by warders. He concluded that there was 0111Y one way to break the power of the POA competition from the private sector. Ptiva- tised prisons aroused some Tories' philo- sophical unease; Enoch Powell himself once argued against it, on the grounds that the state should not delegate its powers of imprisonment. But Michael Howard applied his own pragmatic sanction to those arguments. If you want British 'xis' ons run efficiently, he insisted, you most accept a degree of privatisation. Derek Lewis agreed. By his own testirno- ny, he seemed happy to implement Mr Howard's policies and to provide the lead; ership which the prison service needs': There was only one problem. He could not deliver. By the time of ' the Parkhurst escape, he had been in charge for nearly three years. Judge Tumim had warned bit'', that security at Parkhurst was deficient; all he did was to make one phone call to the governor — he was probably still fretting about Stephen Tumim's reluctance to Pg for lunch. There had to be an inquirY into Parkhurst, and by choosing General S", John Learmont to conduct it, Michael Howard proved that he was not afraid of harsh scrutiny. John Learmont had been Quartermaster' General. This gave Mr Lewis the opening for the most contemptible comment in the book: an expert on billets and blankets' Sir John is indeed an expert on the efficient use of resources, as he is on leadershill report found that this was the qualitY in which the prison service was most deficient and and the blame was inescapable. Mr Lewl, could not have hoped to remain in his Os' after the Learmont Report. • ettl He should not have had the post 111 first place. He was originally appointed 1)Y, Ken Clarke, in a characteristically casual. fashion, but after a satisfactory assessinell;d from a psychologist. There should indee have been a much more basic psychologic! assessment, which he would have failed: This' director-generalship of the prison service a big job. Derek Lewis is a little man.
Previous page
