Should he resign? The first in a monthly series

According to the Daily Mail this week, Charles Clarke has been guilty of allowing foreign murderers to roam the streets. I can't help wondering whether a tourist in the Serengeti, having been told that lions are roaming the area, would be disappointed to find that there are only three of them. In any case, I am curious as to why it is so important that they are foreigners. If British murderers, in the tradition of Fred West or Ian Huntley, had been incompetently released, would that have been considered to be less serious?

Notwithstanding this xenophobic hysteria, there are important issues raised by the scandal. As a law student, I am cursed to think about them rather more than the average tabloid newspaper (and these days, that is all of them), and you may be surprised to learn (I certainly was) that there are fundamental constitutional principles underlying the question of whether or not a government minister should resign. Or at least there used to be. In fact, although there have been plenty of resignations for personal impropriety, no member of the Cabinet has resigned for gross incompetence since Lord Carrington, following Argentina's invasion of the Falklands in 1982.

Michael Howard has criticised Clarke for undermining the principles of ministerial responsibility, which is deeply ironic, because it was Howard himself who first opened up the cracks in the concept, when he failed to resign as John Major’s Home Secretary, after a number of prison escapes. Instead, he blamed Derek Lewis, the head of the Prison Service, who sued for wrongful dismissal in a case that was eventually settled. However, in my opinion, things have been made even worse by the Ministerial Code. Although it is useful in preventing conflicts of interest, and reminding the government, in case they had forgotten, that they should not tell lies to the House of Commons, it has a major omission. It does not say that anyone has to resign simply for making an enormous cock-up.

It is all deeply worrying. Whether or not Charles Clarke should resign in these specific circumstances, the idea that no-one will ever be held to account, as long as they tell the truth about how rubbish they are, and promise to get better, is a serious cause for concern. However, as a student of the constitution, I am slightly conflicted, because I find it all rather exciting, as though I am watching history in the making. Personally, I hope that he doesn’t resign. I have an exam in three weeks and it will be so much better for my essay if he does not.

Gratuitous cows

I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses Google as a spellchecker. Well, I was unsure about the word 'gratuitous' so I typed it in and this was the top entry. It reminds me of a pub quiz in which our team was asked to identify breeds of cows from their pictures. Unfortunately, the vet in our party had gone home early so we found ourselves trying to describe them to her over the phone (not that I advocate cheating in pub quizzes of course). That was fairly gratuitous.

Blogging back to life

Guess what? The blog is back online. Yes, as I am about to leave my place of work (for a very secretive organisation which I can't mention) and will soon be completing my law exams for the year, I am going to have plenty of free time to begin posting regularly again. Therefore, I have returned, in the first instance to show my support for Blogging Against Disablism Day on Monday 1st May, and then I will continue, on a more permanent basis, from June.

My blog will have a more varied theme than before. I will still be enlightening / boring you with my views on all things disbility-related, but I will also be writing more generally on politics and current affairs, informed, I hope, partly by my legal studies. It is horrifying the extent to which media coverage has a tendency to distort the law beyond all recognition. Secondly, following Gimpy Mumpy's kind words about my July 7th post, I am going to try to continue my resolution to include a more personal touch in my blogging, helped enormously by the fact that I will no longer be silenced by the powers that be. Finally, as I have no other source of income, I will also document my attempt to make a little bit of money on the side by playing poker. I hope to achieve something between a subsistence-level income and complete payment of my mortgage. And I may have to get a job at some point.

More soon...