The Cogs Grind Slow and Squeakily

Never let it be said that the Stupid Party is not a broad church: it has room even for David Gauke who, after an entire career spent in an organisation famous for its endless, foam-flecked howling in favour of more and harsher sentences for everyone except tax dodgers, mass murderers and the better class of sex offender, has suddenly noticed that more prison does not necessarily mean less crime. Specifically, the ineffectiveness of short custodial sentences has obtruded itself upon the Gauke consciousness; presumably because, in a system where teachers and landlords are used as border police, it will soon be found cheaper and easier to place offenders under house arrest and order their families to supervise them, on pain of becoming part of the homelessness boom. Still, even a tentatively and no doubt opportunistically non-custodial Conservative is a rare enough breed, and the Minister for Profitable Incarceration is to be congratulated on his timely intuition. It is certainly Britain's misfortune not to have benefited from government by David Gauke's party during the past eight years, rather than by whoever starved the courts of funds, kicked legal aid to pieces, vandalised the probation service and believed that the best way to rehabilitate offenders was to let the brilliant Chris Graybeing deprive them of books.