David Lammy ‘back on his old beat’

If David Lammy was at all concerned about being demoted from the Foreign Office, there was no sign of it during his first appearance as justice secretary in the Commons. Like his predecessor Dominic Raab, Lammy has been made deputy prime minister – a post that gives him priority in the Cabinet pecking order but not, I suspect, very much else. 

Answering questions about court backlogs this week, Lammy lost no time in reminding MPs that he was ‘back on his old beat’. An MP for nearly 25 years, he had served as shadow justice secretary in 2020-21 and was a junior minister at the then Department of Constitutional Affairs in 2003-05.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, knew that any question he might ask Lammy about the state of the criminal justice system would be met with the response that Labour was simply tackling the problems it had inherited. Instead, Jenrick took advantage of a backbencher’s question on the victims of rape and sexual violence.

Contriving to stay within the subject, he wanted to ask the former foreign secretary why he had appointed ‘the “best pal” and known business partner of one of the world’s most notorious paedophiles as our ambassador to Washington’.

Unfortunately for Jenrick, the backbencher’s question had been taken by one of Lammy’s junior ministers, Alex Davies-Jones. She simply ignored it. When he pushed his luck with the speaker by asking her about Lord Mandelson once again, Davies-Jones snarled effectively about the Conservatives’ record.

Shortly afterwards, Jenrick had a chance to ask an open question about the number of foreign nationals in UK prisons. Lammy hit back, referring to reforms in the Sentencing Bill that MPs were about to debate. ‘He needs to get into the weeds and look at the bill,’ said Lammy, deftly patronising his shadow. ‘He can do better.’

Introducing his predecessor’s bill, Lammy said it was an honour to take up this brief. ‘Justice has always been at the heart of my politics over the past 25 years,’ he added, reminding MPs of his professional and political experience.

Lammy’s delivery was relaxed but authoritative. He was speaking more in sorrow than in anger, it seemed, about a bill to deal with ‘the threat that the previous Conservative government left us with: that our prisons could run of out places entirely, with nowhere to put dangerous offenders, police without the capacity to make arrests, courts unable to hold trials and a breakdown of law and order unlike anything we have seen in modern times’.

And yet he could sound angry and urgent when he departed from his notes to speak about recidivism rates or building new prison places. Lammy did not look like someone who had picked up a new ministerial brief little more than a week earlier.

Even newer to the Ministry of Justice is Jake Richards, 36, a barrister and, it seems, the minister who will see the Sentencing Bill through the Commons. He rattled through a confident closing speech, taking a dig at the new Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin, a former magistrate who had accused the government of doing ‘nothing to reverse the current trend for woke justice’, enabling ‘the further politicisation of our once great judicial system’ and treating offenders with greater leniency.

Recalling that Pochin had been issued with formal advice for misconduct in 2018 after a finding that she had misused her status as a magistrate to influence the views of her colleagues in a political context, the minister said ‘her behaviour fell below the standards expected of a magistrate and her speech fell below those of an MP’. 

Earlier, Lammy had tabled the government’s Public Office (Accountability) Bill, which requires public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness. The justice secretary said the duty applied ‘at all times’. In fact, it is limited to their dealings with public inquiries – statutory or non-statutory – and ‘investigations’, which include inquests.

Judging by the number of MPs showing their support for families of the Hillsborough football disaster victims on Tuesday, the government should have no difficulty getting its bill through parliament. The reforms are backed by criminal sanctions but whether they will lead to a change in culture remains to be seen.

Much more challenging for Lammy is the bill currently being prepared by his department to implement Sir Brian Leveson’s proposed criminal court reforms. The former judge is expected to deliver the final part of his report – dealing with efficiency – by the end of this year.

Will the government allow some cases to be tried in the Crown court by a judge sitting with two magistrates instead of a jury, as Leveson proposed? Or will it defer to its critics in the legal profession? That’s where Lammy will have to show real judgement.