Sentencing: Mr Clarke should stay

His comments about rape were foolishly insensitive but the justice secretary should resist opportunist calls for his exit

Editorial
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 May 2011

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David Cameron has a right to be annoyed with Kenneth Clarke, but he should back him not sack him. Yesterday, the justice secretary gave what was undoubtedly, in parts, a foolishly insensitive interview on rape sentencing. In trying to correct his errors later he briefly contrived to muddy the waters further, not calm them. He should regret those lapses and should say so plainly. But the political furore which flared throughout much of yesterday – and which was fed by Ed Miliband's call for Mr Clarke to go – was overwhelmingly opportunist and reactionary. It was driven by an unprincipled alliance between the Labour party and the Daily Mail, both of whom are delighted – for opposite reasons – to use any weapon to attack the coalition government, even if it means feeding ever more people into the prison system to no good public purpose and especially if it means pushing a popular and liberal minister out of the government. Yes, some of Mr Clarke's comments were reckless. But his policy on rape is not. And nor are his proposals on sentencing. Both of them are in the public interest. Mr Cameron should stand up for his justice secretary and for the coalition's penal policies.

Mr Clarke comes as a political package deal. He offers strong opinions – liberal on social policy, orthodox on economics, and unfashionably pro-European – which are forcefully and sometimes colourfully expressed. Along with that comes a rare political ability to make a warts-and-all connection with the public. Mr Clarke is more cunning and disciplined than he can contrive to seem, but he is an important reason, perhaps second only to Mr Cameron himself, why the Conservatives did as well as they did in last year's general election. His presence in the coalition matters a lot, as does his political experience. Without him, the Conservatives would appear more of a sect than they do. With him, there is still a runnable liberal argument in favour of the coalition. The government could ill afford to lose him, which is of course why the Mail and Mr Miliband both want him to go.

A word often used in connection with Mr Clarke is "blokeish". This is very much a double-edged sword, as yesterday exposed. Mr Clarke should never have talked about some rapes being serious ones, since to do so implies to women and men alike that some are not. He was wrong to describe legitimate anxieties about early release of rapists as total nonsense. He should not have charged into the definitional pitfall of date rape. And, even though Mr Clarke's departmental life is made hugely difficult by the fear agenda of the rightwing press, it was unwise of him to suggest that the current campaign on rape sentencing was driven by a wish to put sexual excitement into the headlines. There is nothing exciting about rape. No justice secretary should imply that there is.

Mr Clarke was right to stand up for his sentencing policies. Britain sends more people to prison for longer sentences than most countries, and our use of prison can feed rather than frustrate crime. But Mr Clarke is not engaged in trying to push rapists or any other dangerous prisoners out on to the streets. He was right to stress, as the Stern report on rape complaints put it last year, that "attitudes, policies and practice have changed, fundamentally and for the better". He was right that more rape suspects – and suspects of all kinds – should be encouraged to plead guilty, in part because the protection of rape victims from the second ordeal of a court hearing with its sometimes traumatic cross-examination is important. And while rape is indeed rape, and Mr Clarke was silly to dispute it yesterday, it is also right that there is a scale of serious sentences, with aggravating and mitigating factors, which are properly applied to different cases, in rape as in other crimes. In that sense, some rapes are indeed particularly serious. Even so, very few will ever carry any prospect of an offender being released after only 15 months. And rightly so.