David Shipley

Just over a week ago Andy Burnham came under attack over the impending early releases from prison. His critics included the widow of Andrew Harper, a policeman killed on duty in 2019 by being dragged behind a car for a mile. Andrew’s widow, Lissie, described the possible early release of two of his killers as ‘deplorable’. Burnham insisted that ‘keeping the public safe will be my top priority’ and said of the early release policy that he would ‘look at in detail before we go further forward’. Clearly Burnham wanted to do anything to avoid being the PM who released rapists early. But he will still be releasing men who have done very awful things Now, having presumably done all the detailed looking, the PM has a plan, just in time for the start of his holiday.

Andy Burnham coasted into No. 10 via an uncontested leadership election in which he was never forced to share his views on the great and grave issues facing Britain. As a result, when he became Prime Minister we knew little to nothing about how he planned to address the migration crisis, the energy crisis, the worklessness crisis or the prisons crisis. But to govern is to be confronted with events and forced to choose and so we are fast learning who Burnham is. Last week’s scenes from Ceuta, as 60,000 Moroccans swarmed across the Spanish border, seemed to represent the gulf between the rich, soft West, and the people who come here because they want the wealth we are all too eager to give them.

Forty years ago today Suzy Lamplugh, a 25-year-old estate agent, left her office in Fulham. Colleagues believed she was meeting a client named ‘Mr Kipper’. Despite decades of police investigations, her body has never been found. Indeed, according to Mike Barley, a former police officer who spent many years trying to find Suzy’s body, and her killer, all we know for certain now is the same three things we knew on the evening of her disappearance.  I spoke with Mike, who has written a book: Suzy Lamplugh: The Inside Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Missing Person Investigation. He explained to me that the only things we know for sure are that Suzy left her office around 12:40 p.m. on Monday 28 July 1986, her car was found on Stevenage Road at 10:01 p.m.

In 2019, a police officer, Andrew Harper, was killed while on duty. After responding to a burglary he chased after a car, and was caught in a strap attached to it. The car was driven away, and Harper was dragged for a mile behind it, at an average speed of 42.5 miles per hour. His body was found by colleagues, and a later post-mortem showed he had died of multiple injuries, suggesting he had been caught between the car and the road. He was 28 when he died and had been married less than a month. The car was driven by 18-year-old Henry Long. With him in the car were 17-year-olds Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole. All three were charged, and, in 2020, acquitted of murder. Long pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years.

Just before the second anniversary of his horrific murders, it has emerged that Southport killer Axel Rudakabana has been transferred from Belmarsh prison to Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital. Although this does not change the fact that he is serving a prison sentence, Broadmoor is a more comfortable and safer environment than a jail like Belmarsh. It’s also far more expensive. Instead of the approximately £100,000 per year Rudakubana cost us as a prisoner, he will now cost over £300,000 per year. He will remain in Broadmoor until psychiatrists decide he’s well enough to return to prison. Rudakubana has previously been described by a senior mental health clinician as having a ‘lack of empathy’ and a ‘fascination with violence’.

Louise Haigh is back in government. The former transport secretary resigned in November 2024 following news reports that she had a conviction for an offence of fraud by misrepresentation, which she committed in 2013. The conviction was the result of Haigh pleading guilty to having lied about the loss of her company Blackberry so that her employer would replace it with an iPhone. She had reported a ‘terrifying’ mugging in London to police, claiming that her work mobile had been stolen. Her sentence was a ‘conditional discharge’ – essentially, she was set free with the promise to not do it again. Such a conviction did not bar her from standing for parliament, although it does not appear that she disclosed it during the 2015 election campaign which saw her elected as an MP.

On his last day as Justice Secretary, David Lammy was accused of ‘fighting to cover up foreigners’ crimes’. This is because the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which he led is taking legal action against the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), seeking to overturn a ruling which instructed them to publish conviction data by nationality and offence type for the past seven years. This ICO ruling followed a Freedom of Information request by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC). Why are they so determined to avoid publishing the data?

Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has often been criticised during his two years in the role. For his decision to authorise Lucy Connolly’s prosecution, his angry denials that two-tier justice exists, his ‘fanatical devotion to international law’, being ‘dangerously wrong about the ECHR’, an apparent dislike for the British state and its soldiers, and for ludicrous hyperbole such as when he claimed that critics of the ECHR want migrants to drown. It’s been easy to picture him as a sinister figure, using domestic and international law to serve his politics rather than the interests of his people.

Just eight months ago Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office published a document called,  ‘A Fairer Pathway To Settlement’ which described the Boriswave as an ‘extraordinary open border experiment’, in which an additional 2.6 million people moved to this country between 2021 and 2024. Many of these arrived under the health and care visa. This was a disastrous policy – as the Home Office pointed out at the time, in an ‘attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs’ in the care sector, we imported ‘616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024’. Even worse, over ‘half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were’. The Home Office added that ‘fraud… was rife’.

Electronic Monitoring – ‘EM’ or ‘tagging’ – is at the heart of the government’s plans for the justice system. Tags are used to enforce curfews, prevent drug and alcohol abuse, and even ensure that people stay away from certain areas. In 2021, there were 13,400 tagged people. From September, as part of the new sentencing regime, the Ministry of Justice is introducing a presumption to tag all prison leavers, meaning that from 2027 the government expects an additional 22,000 people will be tagged every year. And as the new Sentencing Acts takes effect, people will be serving shorter sentences and spending more time supervised by probation, meaning that the number on tags is going to rise and rise.

Shabir Ahmed, the leader of the Rochdale rape gang, is for now a free man, living in the UK, having served 14 years after being convicted of 30 child rape offences. Ahmed is a British citizen – he gave up his Pakistani citizenship. As the law stands, he can not be deported because of provisions in the Immigration Act 1971. The law states that because Ahmed arrived in the UK before 1973, and lived here for more than five years before his deportation was considered, he is immune from deportation.  This, naturally, has provoked great outrage, with Andy Burnham having said he wants the home and foreign secretaries to do everything they can in order to deport Ahmed.

It’s clearly asylum week at the Home Office. On Sunday, destructive new ‘safe and legal’ routes for asylum seekers which will create a Burnhamwave were unveiled. Monday brought a commitment to replace employment tribunal judges with specially recruited members of the public. And today we a new plan was revealed which, according to the department’s press release, means ‘asylum seekers [are] to pay’ towards the cost of their accommodation and support. We know from Home Office research published last year that those granted asylum have very low levels of employment (less than 50 per cent), even years after that grant The media management model is familiar to those of us who’ve followed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s team since they were at the Ministry of Justice.

Last week, almost a thousand more illegal migrants entered the country via small boats. Over 204,000 have arrived since 2018. And of them, 76,352 have broken into Britain since Labour’s election win, just under two years ago. Almost all of them claim asylum. Almost none of them are ever deported. Meanwhile the migrant crime wave rolls on. On Friday, three Afghan men who raped a teenage girl before fleeing the country in the back of a lorry were found guilty. Our borders are not secure. It would be an act of wilful neglect to introduce another route for those who wish to live here at our expense On legal migration too, the signs are bleak. The Home Secretary’s long-promised reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) are yet to be enacted.

Jamie Varley has been sentenced to a whole life order for the murder of Preston Davey, his adopted son, who was aged just 13 months at the time of his death. This means Varley will never be released from prison. In addition to the murder charge, Varley was found guilty of two counts of assault by penetration, five counts of cruelty to a child, grievous bodily harm, sexual assault of a child, 13 counts of taking indecent photos of videos of a child, one of distributing an indecent photo of a child, and one of making an indecent photo. Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was sentenced to 25 years for allowing the death of a child, two counts of child cruelty and one count of the sexual assault of a child.

On Monday night, a video from Belfast was shared on social media. It shows a black man raising his bloodstained hand as he pins a white man to the tarmac on a suburban Belfast street. Onlookers shout. ‘He’s trying to cut his head off,’ a man yells. Locals try to drive him away from the limp victim. Finally, the police arrive. On Tuesday, it was reported that the victim, a man in his 40s, is alive, and in hospital with serious injuries to his eyes, neck and back. A 30-year-old Sudanese man has been charged with possession of a blade in a public place, threats to kill and attempted murder. The suspect, who has been charged, had been granted ‘leave to remain’ for five years by the Home Office in 2023.

Henry Nowak was 18, and at the end of his first term at Southampton University, when he was murdered. Around 11:30 p.m. on 3 December last year, Henry was walking back from a night out with his university football team. He hadn’t drunk heavily – during the trial we heard that he was below the drink driving limit. On the way home Henry encountered Vickrum Digwa, the 23-year-old Sikh man who would murder him. Given the seriousness with which our police take racism, of course their response to this was to handcuff Henry Digwa was carrying two blades, an eight-inch ‘shastar’ openly displayed, and a smaller ‘kirpan’ around his neck and under clothing.