Danny Shaw

David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, has had a bruising five months. Last September, he took charge of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which oversees the courts, prisons and probation, as part of a reshuffle sparked by the forced resignation of Angela Rayner. Within weeks, the former foreign secretary had to deal with the accidental release from prison of Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker convicted of sexual assault who’d been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping. The error, by prison staff, was deeply embarrassing for everyone at the department, but it was compounded by Lammy's ham-fisted handling of it. After he’d publicly pledged to grip the problem it emerged other offenders had been mistakenly freed, spawning the unfortunate nickname, ‘Calamity Lammy’.

Over the past week, government ministers and police chiefs have been 'rolling the pitch' for what the Home Office is billing as the biggest overhaul of policing since the service was founded two centuries ago. A carefully co-ordinated communications campaign, involving set-piece interviews, newspaper op eds and filming opportunities, has been constructed by the department ahead of the long-awaited White Paper on police reform: ‘From local to national: a new model for policing’. It’s expected to be published today, six months after it was initially scheduled to be unveiled.

‘The 43-force structure is no longer fit for purpose. In the interests of the efficiency and effectiveness of policing it should change.’ That was the conclusion of a review of the police service of England and Wales in September 2005 conducted by the independent policing watchdog, then known as HMIC. The findings led Tony Blair’s government to attempt a massive reorganisation of policing which at one stage would have involved merging police forces to create 12 larger ones. However, the merger plans became mired in controversy before being abandoned and the ‘change’ recommended by HMIC never happened. Twenty years on, the lessons from that botched reform process must be learned quickly by Sir Keir Starmer’s administration, and its new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

By the standards Shabana Mahmood has set for herself, the speech she made to police leaders at their annual conference in Westminster last week was not the most gripping. The Home Secretary’s delivery was stilted, awkward even, as she stuck closely to the script on the lectern in front of her. She left the stage as soon as she had finished without taking any questions. But there were two sections in Mahmood’s 20-minute address that stood out, sparking speculation that a once-in-a-generation overhaul of policing is on the way. She told the chief constables and police and crime commissioners (PCCs) assembled at the QE II Centre that she would be a ‘reformer at the Home Office’. Then, she referred to the way the £19.9 billion police service is organised in England and Wales.

David Norris, one of the men who murdered the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, had his parole hearing this week, but he was so uncomfortable about being seen that those watching on a videolink only ever saw the back of his head. They did, however, learn a lot about what goes on inside it – and why Norris is nowhere near ready for release from prison. The two days of evidence also highlighted an alarming disparity between the attention given to a criminal bidding for freedom and the victims he left behind. The parole system is still geared towards the needs of offenders, with a pathway to rehabilitation and release for those serving long sentences The Parole Board agreed to hold Norris’s parole review in public.

If it had been a sketch in one of his many comedy shows, it would surely have been rejected as too absurd.  After landing at Heathrow on a flight from Arizona, Graham Linehan, the Irish comic who created Father Ted, was arrested by five armed police officers for tweets that he had posted five months ago. The 57-year-old was told he was being held on suspicion of a public order offence. He was taken to a police station and questioned for several hours, before being released on police bail.  The Commissioner is correct to say that police should not be ‘policing toxic culture wars’.

First came the Starmer-Macron handshake, sealing the UK-France migrant treaty. Following that was a series of Home Office stories about crackdowns on illegal working and smuggler gang adverts, filling the sleepy summer news pages. Then, the 21-page treaty itself was unveiled. And, finally, on Thursday morning Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, sombrely declared that the first migrants had been detained pending their return to France, with pixelated video footage of them supplied to broadcasters just in time for the evening TV bulletins.  In terms of media handling, press coverage and communications, the one-in, one-out migrant deal with France has been impressively choreographed, with a drumbeat of related announcements, statements and policies building up to the launch of the plan.

In December 1999, the Labour government of the day appointed an eminent judge to conduct a review into the workings of the criminal courts in England and Wales. But when Sir Robin Auld’s report landed on ministers’ desks two years later, they faced fierce resistance to his proposals from, among others, parts of the legal profession. Many of his carefully thought through recommendations were never implemented. Lawyers, predictably, have voiced alarm Now, a quarter of a century later, the current Labour administration has an opportunity to make the radical court reforms that the Blair government ducked. The blueprint has been laid out in a compellingly argued 388-page document by another highly respected judicial figure, Sir Brian Leveson.

In last Friday’s early evening rush hour, three police vehicles had parked by the side of the North Circular Road in west London to deal with an incident involving a car and a van. A woman was sitting on a foldaway camping chair, looking shocked. Beside her was a young, uniformed officer, diligently writing an account of what had happened in her notebook.  As I drove past, I thought how, over the next few hours, those notes would have to be typed up onto a computer, along with any other crucial details she had jotted down by hand, while all the key information would also need to be transferred into multiple different databases. How much of the officer’s time would that take up back at the police station when she could be on the beat or responding to other emergencies?

Uncork the Gauke! In the coalition years, whenever George Osborne found himself in a tight spot as Chancellor, advisers would send for David Gauke, who was then a Treasury minister. The tall, imposing but unflappable Gauke would tour the radio and TV studios to deliver a measured message of reassurance, calming the political waters and restoring some credibility to whatever government policy was in the spotlight.  This week, Gauke has been uncorked again – this time by Labour – to solve the prison capacity crisis. When the party came to office, the population in men’s jails across England and Wales was rising so fast it was about to outstrip the number of places.

Migration, migration, migration. Sir Keir Starmer didn’t express it like that in his Downing Street press conference, but he might as well have done. ‘Significantly’ reducing immigration, which is what he pledged in front of the cameras, can now be added to ‘smashing the gangs’ as clear priorities on which Labour will be judged over the next four years. The Prime Minister was at pains to say that the focus on cutting immigration was not about ‘politics’, in other words, some kind of knee-jerk political response to events (local election losses) or the popularity of other parties (Reform).