On Kemi Badenoch: “ran rings round me intellectually” and is “fearless”.
On the ECHR: “It is perfectly possible to have a robust, liberal democracy and not be in it.”
On imprisonment: “I remain convinced that there are far too many women in prison.”
On non-crime hate incidents: “It is a waste of the police’s time to be arbitrating between disputes on X…the police should be pursuing burglars, shoplifters, domestic abusers…fraud. Not someone expressing an opinion.”
A senior politician and former justice secretary has delivered a blistering attack on the whole criminal justice system as badly managed - from the police service through to the courts.
Michael Gove, who served under four Prime Ministers, said that “most police forces are poorly led and poorly run."
“The preparation of material for prosecution by the police and its handover to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is too poor in too many areas,” he adds.
But Gove, whose six Cabinet positions included Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, also attacks the CPS as “badly run and badly led”, adding: “And the operation of our courts, [which are] poorly managed.”
Gove, who is now editor of The Spectator magazine, insists he is not attacking the current DPP (Stephen Parkinson KC) so much as the structure of the whole criminal justice system.
However, he aims fire at the current role of judges in the running of the courts - and suggests they give up the ‘sacred cow’ of the listing of cases.
“Judges are jealous of the administrative control that they have over the Courts Service. It’s not theirs alone but they have a significant role to play.
“I think that judges should be judges. They shouldn’t be involving themselves in the management of the estate in that way.”
The courts system could be more effective than now, he added - if civil servants were in charge of running them rather than judges.
Gove says he put forward a “vanilla” version of this proposal when he was at the Ministry of Justice but met with strong opposition. One senior member of the judiciary “regarded what I was saying as constitutional outrage.”
Gove’s comments come in this week’s episode of the video podcast series "The Lord Chancellors: Where Politics Meets Justice" launched today (Thursday) by The University of Law.
“Most women in jail should not be there”
Gove, who was an MP for 19 years before stepping down at the election, also expresses the view that many offenders, particularly women, should not be in jail.
“I remain convinced that there are far too many women in prison.”
“The imprisoned population [of women] I think is still around 5,000… I would have thought that something like 70-80 per cent of those women in prison would be better off not being incarcerated.”
Similarly many drug users should not be inside, he adds. “We have people in prison who are going into prison who may only have been occasional drug users, who then in prison become habitual.”
Sentencing needed reform and some sentences reduced - but not a blanket reduction across the board, he says. That would erode “trust and faith in the criminal justice system.” Some crimes needed tougher sentences.
Gove says that one of the functions of the justice system was to appreciate the context of people’s offending, their backgrounds, how they had been drawn into crime. “‘The number of people who are truly evil, from whom society needs to be protected for all time, is small.”
Kemi Badenoch is “fearless”
Kemi Badenoch’s principal strength is “intellectual courage,” Gove says.
The Tory leader was a junior minister under Gove when he was secretary of state for what was called ‘levelling up’ - housing, communities and local government.
He gave her indications as to the sort of direction he wanted government finance to go. “And she came back… to explain to me very calmly and very clearly, whilst my instincts may have been right, my approach was completely wrong and the proposals that I was putting forward would blow up in all our faces.”
“The intellectual clarity and the bravery, I think are her strongest features.”