Two weeks after his appointment as justice secretary, Alex Norris faced the modern politician’s greatest ordeal: an 11-minute prime-time interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme. The prime minister had decided to delay the planned early release of about 1,000 offenders convicted of rape, serious child sexual offences and other grooming offences. Norris was left to explain why two men sentenced to 13 years in 2020 for the manslaughter of 28-year-old PC Andrew Harper would remain eligible for release after serving six-and-a-half years in prison. Another 5,000 would also be released early.
I thought the justice secretary came out of the interview rather well. Had he spoken to Harper’s widow, Robinson asked pointedly. ‘Yes, I spoke to her last night,’ Norris replied. ‘Did you apologise to her?’ Yes, said the justice secretary. He had also said sorry to Harper’s mother. But making any further changes to the early-release arrangements in the Sentencing Act 2026 would mean running out of prison places in October or November. ‘We can’t allow that to happen.’
He was right. Though Andy Burnham took responsibility for this week’s carefully calculated compromise, Norris was clearly involved. Both men seemed to accept that, while victims and their families must be treated with compassion and respect, it is not for them to decide how long offenders should serve. Their victims – or, at least, those who give media interviews – inevitably tell reporters that the offender’s sentence was too short. Politicians must tell them, gently, it is all we can afford.
Norris, 42, had served as a junior minister in housing and then a minister of state at the Home Office in the two years since Labour came to power. His was the final cabinet post to be filled by Burnham, which suggests he was not the prime minister’s first choice.
Danny Shaw, the former BBC home affairs correspondent, observed Norris during a year working with the Labour home affairs team in the run-up to the 2024 election. ‘I was really impressed by him,’ Shaw told Ken Macdonald and Tim Owen on their Double Jeopardy podcast last week. Referring to a couple of occasions when Norris had been required to stand in at short notice for the home secretary, Shaw described him as a good communicator with great emotional intelligence. Macdonald noted that
Norris was very highly regarded by officials who worked with him at the Home Office – not something that can be said of every minister.
Using what must be the least precise language in the statute book, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 says that the lord chancellor’s oath shall be taken ‘as soon as may be after his acceptance of office’. We had thought that Norris might be sworn in on one of the nine working days between his appointment and the end of the legal term. If he had time to visit Harrow Crown Court, he could presumably have dropped into the Royal Courts of Justice.
But it was decided that Norris – as well as the newly appointed law officers – would have to wait until 1 October, a day that is already set aside for robes and ceremony. I am sure that suited all concerned. But I like to think that the decision was taken by the senior judiciary rather than the Ministry of Justice: if we really are going to have a new lord chancellor so often, I can imagine Baroness Carr saying, then we are not going to disrupt the judges’ work during the busiest days of the legal calendar.
If this was indeed Carr’s decision, it was a subtle way of asserting her authority over the fourth lord chancellor she has worked with in three years. The lady chief justice and the lord chancellor meet regularly and have joint responsibility for issues such as judicial discipline. But Carr’s second lord chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, upset that collaborative approach by introducing what the government called a democratic lock over Sentencing Council guidelines. The ministerial veto in the Sentencing Act was something Carr said she regretted – though, she added, it would all depend on how the power was used.
Let us hope Norris gets the message. He will have realised by now that he is working with a chief justice at the height of her powers. By the autumn, her four heads of division will all be judges that Carr has been involved in choosing. She will have a new deputy head of criminal justice, expected to be Lord Justice Edis. The High Court will have a new Business and Property Division, with a newly promoted president – Lady Justice Cockerill, perhaps.
And we shall say farewell to the Chancery Division, whose origins as a court go back to the mid-14th century. But some things never change: the Law Society will certainly not be moving to 113 Business and Property Lane.
joshua@rozenberg.net
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