Just in time to meet his self-imposed deadline of early September, the Prime Minister has found a way of preventing two cop-killers from returning to the streets. The method of keeping the killers of PC Andrew Harper, convicted of manslaughter in the 2019 killing, behind bars is to block all those convicted of any form of manslaughter – along with grooming, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child – from eligibility for the early release scheme.

I don’t think it lessens or trivialises the moral enormity of PC Harper’s death to feel uneasy about this

I don’t think it lessens or trivialises the moral enormity of PC Harper’s death to feel uneasy about this

This seems to me to be a telling decision, and not necessarily in the way the PM will hope. As incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has been faced with two huge Home Office headaches. One is prison overcrowding. This is a general, practical and systemic problem. The prison estate is at 97 per cent capacity, and simple maths says that you have to let some people out of the jug if you’re going to keep putting new people into the jug. Building whole new prisons might be a long-term solution to the problem, but the........

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