The Guardian has reported recently that Ken Clarke may be forced to take early retirement for his embarrassing conduct. What did he do? Shout something racist? Pinch the Queens bum at a garden party? No. The Justice Secretary might just lose his job for getting the law right. This argument really speaks for itself, so I’ll open with what actually happened.
At last week’s Conservative Party conference Home Secretary Theresa May spoke about her vision of binning the Human Rights Act and introducing a British Bill of Rights. Part of the Conservative manifesto at the last election, the issue had been shelved with the Liberal Democrats firmly set against the idea.
It went in the speech anyway, with May providing examples of why it needed to be scrapped, focusing on one example in particular where an illegal immigrant was permitted to stay because, as she put it, “and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat.” Unfortunately for her, it turned out she actually was making it up.
It never happened. The case she was referring to did in some small way involve a cat, but that was not the reason he was allowed to remain in the UK. The Human Rights Act includes a clause protecting the right to a family life. It was on the court’s interpretation of this clause that the defence was won, with the Bolivian national alleging that he had lived in the UK long enough to establish family life here. There was much evidence presented to support this, including the fact that he co-owned a cat with his long term partner.
After the case was won, the Home Office did appeal, but this was denied as Senior Immigration Judge Gleeson ruled the immigrant should be allowed to remain. The judge did make a joke about the cat in the case because it was, according to the Bolivian’s lawyer, “irrelevant to the serious issue of applying Home Office policies correctly.”
Firstly, this smacks of incompetence on someone’s part. These facts have been rapidly established by a number of journalists in the aftermath of “catgate,” which means someone in May’s team could have easily checked before including it as a hard hitting line in her speech.
This is where Ken Clarke comes in. As Justice Secretary he was asked for his perspective, to which he replied he didn’t think it was true. He described the example as “laughable, child-like,” which seems a fairly apt description for something which has been well established as both laughable and not true.
Clarke has subsequently said he regrets the colourful language, but insists he got the facts right. Which he did. It seems the problem now is that Clarke managed to make Theresa May look stupid by exposing this factual inaccuracy in her speech. However it was not Ken that made her look stupid. She did that herself when she and her team choose not to check the facts of her speech properly, when they decided not to source their material from the records of the judiciary and instead lift the basis for her speech straight out of a rant in the Daily Mail.
I can’t help but worry when the Home Secretary, responsible for policing of the law, makes such a basic error while searching for a good line to impress her fellow party members, especially on an issue such as the British Bill of Rights which is almost certainly not going to be on the table this Parliament.
So I’m left with the conclusion that we have a Justice Secretary who, however gaffe-prone in the past, was correct on a factual question of UK justice and a Home Secretary who spoke incorrectly. This does not appear to be in dispute, yet it is Clarke who is being treated as though he has done something wrong.
It beggars belief that Cameron is considering showing a competent long serving Minister the door because he had a better grasp of his own brief than a Cabinet colleague who Cameron almost certainly prefers. To do so would dispel any notion that this was a Cabinet based on merit, and mark the loss of a dedicated public servant. I hope Cameron and his advisers take the time to calm down and actually look at the facts of the situation. If May had done that at the start this never would have happened.