David Gauke: the unflushable wet wipe of British politics

What’s the worst kind of MP? We all have our particular pet hates. One of mine is former justice secretary David Gauke. Plenty of MPs are disloyal, plenty of MPs are pompous, but Gauke managed to combine both of these qualities in one unappetising package.

He was horrified by the Brexit vote in 2016 and did everything he could to stop its implementation. He was eventually kicked out of the Conservative Party in September 2019, after rebelling against the Tory government over its attempts to leave the EU, before being given the boot as an MP by the voters of his South West Herts constituency. You’d think by now Gauke might have got the message.

But now he’s back, again – like the unflushable wet wipe of British politics. This time he’s been hired by the Labour government to head up a review into prison sentencing – an area where you may have noticed there have been problems of late. Like many of this government’s actions, Gauke’s appointment verges on trolling. It’s John Bercow all over again.

It is deeply odd how failed, despised and rejected politicians often develop second lives as experts or political advisers. Yes, all political careers end in failure, but there are degrees. No other career has this kind of afterlife after crashing and burning. Nul points Gemini don’t run masterclasses in how to win the Eurovision Song Contest. Businessman Gerald Ratner, who once described some of his company’s own products as ‘total crap’, didn’t set himself up as a public-relations guru.

Gauke may look like a bruiser – the kind of Tory who’d give you a dead arm and steal your pocket money. Indeed, he was one of the chief architects of George Osborne’s austerity policies in the early 2010s. Yet appearances can be deceptive. He is, in fact, one of those Tories who is approved of by the Good People of the land – that is, people who will never, ever vote Conservative and whose opinions the Tories could and should safely ignore.

Gauke is Rory Stewart-adjacent, and even supported him during his ill-fated leadership attempt. Along with the departed Anna Soubry, Nick Boles and Gavin Barwell, and the unfortunately still very much with us Caroline Nokes and Alicia Kearns, Gauke is one of those Tories who found Brexit and any attempt to push back against mass immigration just all so frightfully, unutterably ghastly. Their main allegiance is to their own class, full of ‘sensible’ people being terribly nice to each other. Their world, in which the EU is unquestionably brilliant, has never existed outside their own minds, but they are happy there.

Astonishingly, Gauke has now been admitted back into the Conservative Party. But, presumably, even the Tories wouldn’t actually put him up for a seat again. Why political parties think they have to be ‘broad churches’ is mystifying. None of the people tolerated under the ‘broad church’ label has brought anything but trouble to the Tories, or to Labour. In Labour’s case, broad-church congregant Jeremy Corbyn nearly destroyed it.

Now, new attorney general Shabana Mahmood has announced a sentencing review to be headed up by Gauke, to look at ways to reduce prison overcrowding in the long-term. As viewers of Yes Minister will be well aware, the purpose of such reviews is to tell a government what it wants to hear and to give politicians something to point at. A review can then be acted upon – like the Cass Review on the NHS’s gender-identity services – or totally ignored – like the Sewell Review on race and ethnic disparities – depending on the government’s wishes. (Though the Cass Review is seemingly now being both implemented and ignored.) If the author of a review plays his or her cards right, and comes back with what the government wanted, a nice peerage awaits.

The Ministry of Justice under Labour wants to hear that fewer custodial sentences are required and Gauke is on record supporting this. So it’s just a matter of the government paying someone to tell it what it already thinks it wants.

Gauke is perfect for this role. He is both a member of the party that helped cause the crisis in our prisons and an idol of the party that doesn’t want to have to solve it. Among the mooted ‘solutions’ is the option to ‘expand the use of punishment outside of prison’. This could include good-behaviour ‘credits’, sobriety tags and home curfews. There is even talk of apps and smart watches to monitor offenders.

Keir Starmer’s Labour loves this gimmicky approach to policymaking, this appearance of doing something. Like the rest of the political class, it can’t face up to tackling the realities of what successive governments have done to the country. That would mean confronting unpleasant facts, such as the dire state of our perilously understaffed prisons. It would mean accepting some blame and coming up with big, bold solutions. All of which is unthinkable for this government. So, instead, we have ‘what if we get David Gauke to say there should be an app’?

We are in a situation where everything is buggered but nobody will admit to carrying out the buggering. No wonder the government picked Gauke. He can always be relied upon to toe the establishment line.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.