In one sentence, Jacqui Smith became the Gerald Ratner of the Home Office

There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved into nothing in 1991 when he cheerfully pronounced that his products were ‘crap’. Matt Barrett, the chief executive of Barclays, did a Ratner too, when he told a bunch of MPs that he would not let his daughters anywhere near a Barclaycard and did not use one himself because they were too expensive. Perhaps those who behave in this way should be ‘Ratnered’ — lose their livelihoods as a result of having confessed that the products, goods or services for which they are responsible are utterly bloody useless. A Home Secretary who says she dare not step out of her flat of an evening for fear of being stabbed, mugged or raped should most definitely be well and truly Ratnered.

Of course, there is another way of describing those supposedly shocking statements from Barrett, Ratner and Smith — that they were telling the truth. And a truth which, underneath, the rest of us know all too well. Particularly so in Jacqui Smith’s case: there has been a mass exodus from London in the last five years precisely because people do not feel safe walking the streets of an evening. People have been fleeing to the most terrible places — Guildford, Basingstoke, Broadway — so that they might sleep at night unilluminated by the fierce lights from a police helicopter circling overhead, undisturbed by the sudden sharp crack of a bullet entering a teenager’s skull.