Prison governors in England summoned to an urgent meeting with ministers as deputy PM comes under scrutiny

Good morning. Except it isn’t if you are David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary. Or Alex Davies-Jones, a junior justice minister, who has been doing the morning media round. Lammy took PMQs for the first time yesterday, but the coverage is a nightmare, partly because it coincided with news about two more prisoners being released by mistake, even though Lammy recently required governors to do extra checks to stop this happening, and partly because he dodged questions about this in the chamber.

The overnight Guardian version of the story is here.

For the Conservatives, this is like Christmas has come early (even though their spokesperson, James Cartlidge, who was deputisting for Kemi Badenoch at PMQs, messed up his questions, as John Crace explains here). Crudely put, their assumption is: people don’t like criminals, people don’t like migrants, so migrant criminals are doubly bad, and Labour are letting them out. As they have been commenting on this over the past 24 hours, Kemi Badenoch, Chris Philp, Robert Jenkins et al have found it hard to conceal the glee.

As ever, the reality is a bit more complicated. Of all public services, the prison service is probably the most dysfunctional, and has been for years. The accidental release of prisoners, though deplorable, is not that unusual; Lammy told the Commons recently that under Tories they were happening at a rate of 17 per month. Under Labour, the numbers have gone up sharply, but that has coincided with the government implementing a huge early release scheme because, when it came into office, the prison service was days away from not being able to take any more inmates because of over-crowding. The Algerian released by mistake from Wandsworth prison last week was not an asylum seeker, as the Tories originally claimed. He is a sex offender – on the basis of an indecent exposure conviction, for which he got an 18-month community order. He reportedly has other convictions too. A few days after he was mistakenly released, a white man from Surrey who had been jailed for almost four years for fraud offences was also let out by mistake, but the Tories don’t seem so interested in that error.