Since their 14 years in government ended so abjectly last July, Conservatives have clung to a consoling fiction: that they may have been in office, but never were they allowed to exercise meaningful power. Instead, wounded Tories claim, the hands of successive prime ministers were tied by operatives of the permanent state: over-mighty regulators, woke quangocrats and left-leaning civil servants who believe they know best and are inclined to discount the views of the electorate that pays their wages.
These complaints are not entirely baseless, as shown by the row between the Ministry of Justice and the Sentencing Council over guidelines, issued by the latter, that would have allowed judges to treat minority offenders more leniently than other Britons. This was an egregious example of the power of quangocracy to fashion social policy free from political accountability. But blaming the blob is not an adequate alibi for Tory failure. It has taken a Labour cabinet minister to show that the real problem with the Tories’ tenure was a chronic lack of political will.
Robert Jenrick, the energetic shadow justice secretary, deserves credit for bringing to public attention the farce of an unelected sentencing body instructing the judiciary to take into account factors like ethnicity and gender reassignment when considering punishment. Mr Jenrick’s tireless campaigning gave the public a taste of what a robust opposition can do. He was right to warn that the proposed guidelines would leave the judiciary, and by extension the Ministry of Justice, open to accusations of systemic discrimination, especially against white males. The only problem for him was that Ms Mahmood fully agreed. More than that, she brought the power of her office to bear against those who seek to wield power without mandate, and with a ruthlessness that eluded her predecessors.
In the coming days Ms Mahmood will legislate to overrule the Sentencing Council and, in time, give herself the power to reject or amend its recommendations. At last, a minister in a government endowed with a substantial majority (just as Tory ministers were between 2019 and 2024) is showing an awareness of power. It was Lord Hailsham, a Tory lord chancellor, who coined the term “elective dictatorship” to describe the immense leverage that a majority at Westminster confers over the Whitehall machine. Yet Hailsham’s recent Conservative successors spent the best part of a decade taking dictation from officialdom. Ms Mahmood has put them to shame, seizing the reins of power to expunge by emergency legislation guidelines that violate that most fundamental of British principles: equality before the law.
Mr Jenrick has criticised Ms Mahmood for failing to act quickly enough. But, unlike his party, she is at least acting. The discriminatory guidelines were suspended yesterday, pending their abolition. This hypocrisy in castigating the current government for situations that have their roots in the last one is also to be seen in the Chagos islands fiasco. True, Labour has betrayed the national interest in offering the strategically vital territory to Mauritius, but that betrayal began with the Tories.
When Labour walks in step with voters, governing with common sense and fairness, and rejecting invasive nannying and wokery, it will succeed. Like Ms Mahmood, it must be prepared to take on arrogant, unelected bureaucrats who govern by stealth. It is ministers who should decide.
