You Will Believe A Pig Can Fly

The Guardian's Michael White leaps gallantly to the defence of the Minister of Unfitness for Purpose, who is "determined to get out alive and serve as G. Brown's loyal law-and-order lieutenant", to the inestimable advantage of British justice. "Elected politicians are not always wrong," even when they have a mandate from thirty per cent of the voters, "and the great army of mouthy judges and commentators, or, more discreetly, civil service and police briefers, are not always right". The present Minister of Unfitness for Purpose is made of "sterner stuff than Steve Byers or Charles Clarke; he is less vulnerable than David Blunkett", all of which appears to send a shudder of pleasurable excitement through the Guardian's Michael White. The Minister "has no intention of being bounced into resignation or dismissal by the tabloid-Tory pack, the very people who want more offenders locked up at £40,000 a year, more paedophiles monitored, but also less government 'nannying' and lower taxes" and, of course, the very people to whose little whims and megrims the Minister and his colleagues have so resolutely pandered. Hence the prisons crisis. The Tory press wanted more people locked up; New Labour has given them what they wanted; yet the Tory press have formed an alliance of convenience with a couple of powerful trade unions, the Prison Officers Association and the Police Federation, because "in pursuit of a Labour home secretary the Daily Beast is not choosy about its allies". Which shows that if you give a tapeworm food its appetite will increase, even unto the possibility of doing business with the unregenerate Scargillites of the Police Federation. Quite how it demonstrates John Reid to be anything other than the dithering right-wing incompetent most people seem to think he is, the Guardian's Michael White unfortunately fails to make explicit. Michael White also waxes indignant about "a couple of provincial judges shoot[ing] their mouth off over prison policy" and tries to bring a bit of perspective to the matter: "the lord chief justice intervened twice at the weekend to explain that what the home secretary had done in reminding judges about non-custodial sentences was to restate existing policy", rather like his colleague, Patsy Hackitt the Nurses' Friend, advising health professionals on their rotas. Why on earth should any real professional, any genuine public servant, take offence just because a minister who cannot run his own department chooses to lecture them on the bleeding obvious? The Guardian's Michael White cannot understand it. "The home secretary may not quite be the macho Superman he sometimes seems to suggest he is", but it looks as if the Guardian's Michael White may have his Lois Lane costume ready, just in case.