A Dangerous Shuffle?

So Charles Clarke has been sacked, after refusing a demotion. I should be pleased given my earlier comments, but I can't help but feel a little uneasy. Things have moved on since last weekend and I'm no longer sure whether he went because of his original undoubtedly gross mismanagement, or because of these copycat front pages. The incident described here is completely unrelated to the prisoners who were not deported due to an administrative error, but rather concerns someone who was not deported to Somalia because he would have been at risk of suffering inhuman and degrading treatment had he done so. He was later named as a suspect in the investigation of the murder of the policewoman, Sharon Beshenivsky, although this would have been impossible to predict because his original conviction was only for robbery. Therefore, not only was Charles Clarke's action not a mistake, it would actually have been illegal for him to have done anything else. Was he the first minister to be dismissed from his job for refusing to breach the Human Rights Act?

Moving on to the case of Ruth Kelly, I've no doubt that you remember this so-called scandal from a few months ago (I prefer this version). As with Charles Clarke, the action demanded by the right-wing press, a blanket ban on all people on the sex offenders register from teaching in schools, would have been illegal. This is because the law gave her the discretion to make exceptions and, when such discretion is given, some exceptions must be made. If the law was a bad one, this was the fault of Parliament, not of Ruth Kelly. Furthermore, because many of the people on the list had not been convicted of a criminal offence, to have banned them from teaching could have contravened their right to a fair trial. However, this did not prevent Tony Blair from sidelining her into a new department responsible for local government. Was she the second minister to be dismissed from her job for refusing to breach the Human Rights Act?