Looking for a boost on a grey day full of awful news, I was trying to remember the last time I felt politically optimistic. Was it for a real reason, or just a surfeit of youthful idiocy? Anyway, I accidentally diverted to a different memory, a time I looked around the Timpson Prison Training Academy at HMP Wandsworth donkey’s years ago.
Here was an objectively good idea: train prisoners for a job they could plausibly get when they were released. Politicians talk constantly about reoffending rates and very rarely about what drives them: the difficulty of making a living once you have served a prison sentence. They also talk constantly about the private sector as though it’s universally pro-social and efficient, when in fact it’s rare to see a CEO and think: I would love to put him in charge of a problem. James Timpson is the only businessman I have ever thought that about, so it seemed like a certainty that politics would never call upon him. Yet here he is, minister for prisons.
