THE PRISONER OF QUEEN ANNE'S GATE

Last week the Justice Committee took evidence about the state of prisons, and plans for prisons, from the prisons minister, Rory Stewart, and a number of his officials - Mike Driver, CFO of the MoJ and Justin Russell, head of ORC (Offender Reform and Commissioning).

Very visibly and curiously absent was one person – the actual head of the Prison Service, Mike Spurr. He was referred to once or twice but no-one explained why he wasn't there, as he and all his predecessors have been on such occasions in the past. So none of the people present works, or ever has worked, in a prison, or managed prisons: yet the sessions was about the work of prisons and what is happening in them.

Though - another oddity – it is increasingly difficult to distinguish Stewart's role from Spurr's: Stewart often talks as though he is the one running prisons, with absolutely no sense of the difference in role between being minister and actually managing the Service (odd reversal of Michael Howard's insistence that he was only responsible for 'policy', never 'operations').  Which makes plausible the rumour that Stewart, bizarrely, is so utterly smitten with prisons that he wants to move over to head the Service, believing that he is the man to save it.

I think I have seen this movie before. Spurr is being held locked in a room in a high tower within Queen Anne's Gate, being interrogated night and day until he signs the confession that he personally sabotaged the Spending Review settlement by moving all the decimal points around at random (which would explain  a lot, come to think of it). Stewart keeps trying on his new uniform as Director General of HMPPS in front of a large mirror and ordering extra gold trim here and there, occasionally snarling at his toadying ORCs, 'Hasn't he signed yet?'. Meanwhile Spurr's loyal staff are arrested one by one or re-posted to Dartmoor or loaned to the Bulgarian prison service. But one loyal secretary has found out where Spurr is being held and is as this moment inching along the window ledge, high above Petty France, towards Spur's cell, a mobile phone clenched in her teeth, the phone number of the Clerk of the Justice Committee already on rapid dial...

TO BE CONTINUED