About the time Chris Atkins’s cell was slammed shut at Wandsworth Prison for the first time, I was sitting on the tenth floor of the Ministry of Justice, glued to BBC News. My boss, Michael Gove, had just been given the boot by Theresa May, and as his speechwriter I would be inherited by whoever replaced him as justice secretary.
Without warning, No. 10’s black door swung open to reveal a delighted looking Liz Truss — the new chief executive of a creaking government department with 75,000 employees (including all prison and probation staff), with responsibility for a prison system that was in meltdown. I remember madly googling what she might think about prisons, only to be reminded that she was coming straight from the environment department. The archive was chock-full of pig disease and bees.
On the other side of Wandsworth’s high prison walls, Atkins remembers a feeling of being somehow ‘mystically linked’ to Truss, ‘as we both embarked on our unlikely prison journey at the same time’.
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