After shambles at MoJ, Twitter-gaffe MP gets prisons job
Nearly 48 hours after the reshuffle started, Downing Street has finally named the prisons minister. Andrew Selous, MP for South West Bedfordshire, got the job.
The rumours are that Jeremy Wright, who was made attorney-general, was originally asked to stay on but he refused. I've never rated Wright, but some estimable figures in penal reform think he's a decent enough man hamstrung by the inadequacies of his boss.
Then they offered the job to Shailesh Vara, the justice minister who recently led Ministry of Justice (MoJ) efforts to deny legal aid to anyone who'd been in the UK less than a year – a move the high court ruled unlawful yesterday. He turned it down. And apparently they don't trust Liberal Democrat justice minister Simon Hughes enough to do it. That's probably for good reason. Hughes is being lobbied to put some distance between himself and his Tory colleagues before the general election.
So they've settled on Selous, a man whose only contribution to public life is to have highlighted the inadequacy of his politics in the very sentence he used to express them. Back in June last year, the Tory MP decided to tell the world that he believed immigrants should not have access to benefits unless they show they're learning English. One is grateful the same rule was not applied to him, because he was unable to spell 'learn' correctly. To quote it in full:
"Strongly support the loss of benefits unless claimants lean English."
The tweet made him the butt of jokes on Twitter for the rest of the day. It was probably the most widely viewed tweet he ever wrote. He was rated the sixth worst MP on Twitter in our annual awards last year.
Selous doesn't seem to have any background on justice or prison issues. I searched his personal website for both terms and got nothing back on his brief, apart from one post where he celebrated Labybird's book donations for Fathers' Story Week, a Fatherhood Institute campaign which gets fathers to read to their kids. It aims to get fathers and children spending time together in "schools, children's centres, libraries and" – wait for it – "prisons".
Selous' commitment to prisoners getting an opportunity to read to their children will presumably mean that he opposes Chris Grayling's prisoner book ban. I wouldn't count on it though.
In parliamentary answers to shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan, Wright revealed that he either wilfully or due to incompetence knew very little about what's going on in prisons. Downing Street appears to have found the only man who knows less to replace him. Grayling will chalk that up as a victory.
And the justice secretary had another reason to celebrate the reshuffle. It meant John Hayes got moved from Downing Street as David Cameron's private secretary and fixer.
Hayes was sent to No10 to act as a bridge between unruly Tory backbenchers and the PM, sniffing out potential revolts and assuring the more frothy-mouthed specimens that they had a man on the inside. On the plus side, he despised Grayling.
His local constituency has been one of the many victims of the MoJ's incompetence. The closure of Spalding magistrates' court, which is due in December, is expected to leave the good people of South Holland travelling miles for their day in court and trigger overloads in nearby Boston and Lincoln.
Hayes has been furiously campaigning on the issue, bringing back concessions from Grayling to the people of his constituency, including a video link in Spalding located in the soon-to-be-vacated courthouse. But yesterday he was livid that consultation documents on the closure were only released to a chosen few and that they had been written so densely as to be impenetrable.
"Because this consultation is dense to the point where it may discourage responses, I intend to work with the Lincolnshire Free Press [his local paper] to provide a straightforward opportunity for people to express their views," Hayes said.
Grayling will feel he came out of the reshuffle fairly well. Firstly, he kept his job, which is a remarkable feat given the ineptitude with which he has conducted it. Secondly, he's got himself a compliant figure to keep forcing through his misguided and counter-productive "right-wing" solution to rehabilitation. And thirdly, an influential opponent has been removed from Downing Street.
Fortune favours those who least deserve it.
