Chris Grayling is a bin fire of a politician, so of course Rishi Sunak put him in the House of Lords

That's a long headline isn't it? Really should have been more of a summary, but this is Substack: No-one can tell me what to do

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

There's no better representation of the decline of the political class than Chris Grayling. 

Probably there are stupider people. Mark Francois has a lower capacity to handle a moderate cognitive load, as does Lee Anderson. There might even be more cynical people. Robert Jenrick is currently exploring the furthest reaches of his own venality. Nigel Farage is about as reprehensible as it is possible to endure. But there is a crucial distinction. Grayling had power - serious power - for a sustained period and secured constant promotion. 

He was given a procession of ministerial posts - employment minister, justice secretary, leader of the House, transport secretary. He failed in every one of them, as a result of his deep-seated mental, emotional and presentational deficiencies. And then he was given another job regardless, so he could do it all over again in some new area of policy. As we'll see in a moment, the extent of his failure is so vast, and the consequences so long-lasting, that people still suffer from them today. Over the next few months, terrible things are liable to happen, and part of the reason for that will lie at his door, as a result of the decisions he made.  

Once he left front bench politics, Grayling continued to fail upwards. He failed like a rocket, surging out of the atmosphere, no signs of life aboard, but the engines firing regardless. Boris Johnson tried to make him Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, arguably the most sensitive body in parliament. He was appointed as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. He was made adviser to Hutchison Port Holdings, at a rate of £100,000 for seven hours work a week. And then finally, in an entirely predictable manner, he was made a Lord. He entered the Chamber last month. One last tasteless epithet to Rishi Sunak's name as he left Downing Street.

What a career. Each move, a step towards something greater. Never quite made the top league, admittedly - no great offices of state - but he rose permanently upwards and now has a place in the legislature for life. He was not hampered by his lack of charisma, or his patent ineptitude, or his moral blindness, or his disastrous track record. He was not restrained by the consequences of his actions, which were uniformly catastrophic. He drifted ever onwards, towards the ermine-clad sanctuary in which he now finds himself.

In 2013, when he was justice secretary, Grayling privatised probation. Readers of How Westminster Works and Why it Doesn't (buy it now you cunts etc etc) should be familiar with this bit, but just in case you're not, here's how it went down: Really fucking badly. It was the policy equivalent of stuffing a shotgun in your mouth and pulling the trigger.

His plan involved splitting the service into public and private, then handing out the contracts to a bunch of different companies. The main aim was to introduce market mechanisms to probation. It had been working pretty well until this point, in a difficult area of policy. By the time he was done with it, it was on its knees, bleeding out onto the floor. None of the market mechanisms worked, because they could not isolate the cause of rehabilitation in order to authorise the payment. This triggered a series of toxic incentives in the companies - ‘if we can’t make money that way, we can definitely do it by maximising workload’. All of this was well understood at the time and people repeatedly tried to warn him. He ignored them. And then things came to pass exactly as his critics had said they would.

The Ministry of Justice also got the wrong balance between public and private work levels. The private sector got too little work, so the firms started to go bust, properties were sold and staff were made redundant. The public sector got too much, so staff suffocated under an avalanche of cases, unable to pay proper attention to any of them. Eventually their capacity for risk assessment was compromised. Probation officers stopped seeing former inmates and those on community sentences, or began to see them only in the most cursory and superficial way. This part of the workforce basically just burned out. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster.

The service was brought back under national ownership by Grayling's successors, but by then it was too late. It was fucked and it has remained fucked ever since. No-one cares about it. No-one gives a good goddamn about probation. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that it is the barrier which keeps us safe, that it is at least as important as prisons and the police, and in fact a necessary corollary to them - it just doesn't matter. People simply couldn't care less. And because they don't, newspapers don't write about it. And because newspapers don't write about it, politicians don't do anything about it. 

We like to blame journalists and politicians and we should. They must work to introduce people to ideas they are not otherwise interested in. They have a social duty to bore their readers and lead their voters. But we should be honest that readers and voters are themselves the origin of the problem. They care about the NHS, so it's ring-fenced from spending cuts. They don't care about the criminal justice system, so it isn't. It really is as simple as that.

That brings us to where we are this week: with an expected 40,000 prisoners set to emerge from prison under the early-release system. Who is expected to look after them? Probation. The move threatens to raise its caseload by a fifth. And there is absolutely no capacity in the system to deal with it.

An excellent investigation by the House Magazine this week analysed the last 33 reports by HM Inspector of Probation over the previous two and half year period. It found that things have not improved since the low point of Grayling's experiment. There is no recovery. Every service has received a failing grade. Two received the lowest score possible. 

Some services are being run with less than half the number of staff required, leaving individual officers handling perhaps twice their usual caseload. The consequences are appalling. You're buried under work: assault, rape, dangerous driving, drugs. And in that context the officer has to somehow assess risk. How likely is this person to reoffend? Under what conditions would they be likely to beat their wife again? Those calculations are made on subtle assessments of risk - have they gone back to drinking, who are they hanging out with, has anyone heard shouting from the flat, have they got a job, are they attending drug testing? But that degree of careful diligent work is impossible in the smouldering wasteland Grayling left behind.

This can be fixed. A new scheme has promised to recruit 1,000 new probation officers by March 2025. But these things take time. It takes 18 months for an officer to qualify, let alone start working at optimal capacity. It'll be years before we feel the effects of the decisions made today. And that, by the way, is the reason for Keir Starmer's bleak narrative at the moment. Shit takes time. It takes years to handle things like this, or NHS waiting lists, or transport initiatives. People have to be braced for that. There is no serious approach to the situation we find ourselves in that can be achieved overnight. 

This story is really a reminder of how long the effects of political mismanagement last. Grayling comes in, picks up the toys, throws them around a bit, walks off, and never thinks about it again. The rest of us have to live with it.

For him, it'll all be a distant memory. When he reformed probation, I was still a sprightly young 30-something. The first Avengers film had just come out. Daft Punk's Get Lucky was still playing on the radio. And now here we are, over a decade later, and the effects are still being felt. 

It's also a reminder of what happens when people stop giving a shit. Probation never really had defenders. It doesn't have those pundits who will go out to bat for it, the way they do for the NHS, or defence, or even welfare. It's just this blotted-out area of policy, a forgotten part of town that no-one really visits. But whether we ignore it or not, the effects of that neglect are real. It might be someone whose phone is stolen outside a Tube station, or a domestic violence victim sitting scared at home, or just the perpetrator of the crime themself - someone who could have been fixed if we had a system in place to support them, but who will spiral because we do not. A life that could have been meaningful, condemned to the limitless cycle of petty reoffending and the revolving doors of a fit-to-bursting prison estate.

Most of all it is a story about how British politics works. It's a story of a man who fucked up on a Biblical, properly Old Testament level, a man without a single quality to redeem him, who was nevertheless promoted over and over again and is now feted with a seat in the Lords. A man who never once had to face the consequences of his actions, who never once had to even sit in front of a committee and account for his time in power, and the things he did when he had it. A man who could succeed despite perennial failure. It's the story of Chris Grayling, a grey and mindless figure, whose success perhaps best encapsulates the political culture in which we live.

Why is that the main element of this story? It's not out of spite - although, to be clear, I am absolutely chock full of that. It is because it sets the terms by which these things happen again in future. It is not enough to simply replace idiot-child ministers with serious-minded ones. We have to create a sense of jeopardy. We have to produce a notion of risk in ministerial behaviour. They must feel that irresponsibility has a consequence, rather than just being a prelude to a peerage. 

Until they do, the incentives that created this state of affairs will continue. And we'll still be talking about the disaster of probation when the seventh Avengers film comes out.

Odds and sods

I'd normally talk about a film or book here, but honestly I've degenerated into playing Cyberpunk 2077 so much now that it is basically the entirety of my cultural life. If anyone is up for a detailed discussion of how to run a netrunner stealth build on very hard difficulty setting, I am here for it, but I suspect it's a minority pursuit. So instead I wanted to briefly mention why things feel quite strange in politics at the moment. 

It's because we're in the world waiting to be born. That's partly to do with policy. Until the Budget in a few weeks, we don't really understand the direction of the government. We don't even really have a decent grasp of how left or right wing it will be economically. We have glimpses of health policy, but no proper details there yet either. All we're getting from Starmer at the moment is a narrative framework without a plot to hang it on. That's natural really - he went from no-hope opposition leader to historic majority PM in one cycle. They didn't have the same work done as New Labour did in 1997, building off the forums John Smith had set up.

A new government also has a strange effect on those who talk about politics. Some journalists will always be opposed, so they're hitting hard. Some - far fewer - will always be supportive. But most operate somewhere in the middle. They don't want to alienate the new regime, but nor do they want to be captured by it. 

Something similar happens in think tanks and pressure groups. They expect to be dealing with Labour for a decade and with whichever minister they've got in their policy area for five years. So they criticise, if at all, rather cautiously, even on those areas where we do have clear policy. They're cagey and hesitant, holding back on what they want to say to make sure the working relationship is in a viable place. 

Add to that the summer holidays, with most people still feeling rather low energy after some time away, and the odd turn-it-on-and-off-again nature of the short pre-conference parliamentary return, and you get this odd liminal period, in which politics is kinda back but not really operating at full capacity yet. So everything feels rather misty and indecipherable. 

Soon enough, it'll take shape, particularly after the Budget. But for now, everyone is grasping along, their hands in front of them, searching for solidity.

Honestly, I'm fine with that. Gives me more time with Cyberpunk 2077. These quickhacks won't graft themselves.

Final note: exciting announcement

I've been following Tom Rowley's Substack-documented adventure starting a bookshop since he began. I mean, how on earth could you not? I'm guessing that every single person reading this has at some point daydreamed about what it would be like to set up a bookshop. So watching someone actually do it, from the ground up, has been fascinating.

Backstory, the shop he created, has a lovely online non-fiction bookclub. You get sent the book every month and then there's an online chat with the author. I'm doing it on September 24th and there's a special deal for anyone reading this newsletter: You get £5 off the usual £16 price, meaning you get the book, free postage and access to the event, all for the price of the book alone. If you haven't read it yet… well, firstly what the fuck is the matter with you. And secondly, this seems a damn fine way to finally do it.

Just follow this link here, choose one-off membership, and enter JOINUS at the checkout. They'll email the Zoom session link a day beforehand.

See you then.