Chris Grayling gets a relatively easy ride over reoffending rates

Theresa May accepted her Spectator Politician of the Year award with the quip: ‘It used to be a joke that I lock them up and Ken Clarke lets them out, now they say I lock them up and Chris Grayling throws away the key.’ The right wing press, as Ken Clarke is given to calling it, is much enamoured with Grayling and May. ConservativeHome’s Mark Wallace describes them as the ‘dynamic duo’, and writes a long appreciation of their ‘increasingly strong message on crime’.

There is, of course, as Wallace concedes, more to governing than messages. The Mail on Sunday carries a small item about reoffending rates under the headline ‘scandal of prisoners who strike again’. 5 years have passed since David Cameron and Nick Herbert, who was then Shadow Justice Secretary, promised a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ and yet here we are. The Mail reports:

‘In 2011, 356 adult offenders committed serious violent or sexual offences after release from a sentence of less than a year, while a further 2,482 committed serious ‘acquisitive’  crimes such as robbery within 12 months of being released.