The boat race protester’s prison notebook

If the weather had been this foul at the time of the last Oxford-Cambridge boat race, I might not have found myself in the middle of the River Thames, or served a six-month prison sentence in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. My plan, then, was to make a protest against inequalities in British society, government cuts, reductions in civil liberties and a culture of elitism. Not all of it, I admit, I had time to articulate in the water. At first, I was charged under the Public Order Act, which meant that the maximum penalty would have been a fine, but after various exhortations — including from a Tory MP, Michael Ellis — I was convicted under the Public Nuisance law and had a spell inside. I emerged a changed man, though not because I’d changed my views. I found out I was going to be a father.

Many convicts will know how odd it is to hear life-changing news from ‘the outside’ over a telephone.