Unlocked and Unhinged

It appears that the minions of the Minister for Justice and Heterosexual Hostelry are nearly as good with computers and things as their brothers in efficiency, the minions of the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith. Having lost an unencrypted hard drive with the details of sixteen thousand people in 2011, the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration was issued with new devices which could encrypt the informaton stored on them. These devices were given to the prison service in 2012, but nobody realised that the encryption option had to be switched on, and now another unencrypted hard drive has absconded with the details of just under three thousand people. In accordance with the demands of natural justice, the taxpayer has been fined £180,000 for the omission.

Perhaps these comic episodes might throw some light on Chris Graybeing's notorious ban on sending books to prisoners. The Minister for Justice and Heterosexual Hostelry does not persist with the ban merely because he is a vindictive, sanctimonious, authoritarian guttersnipe with the morals of a tapeworm and the breadth of vision of an Ebola virus. He is, of course, all that and less; but in the context of his department's other achievements it seems increasingly evident that neither Graybeing nor his minions has ever seen a book or would know how to operate one if they did.