Poker-face Jacqui unfazed by the wrong facts

Jacqui Smith had almost everything going for her yesterday. She certainly had the entourage as she arrived before the Home Affairs Select Committee. She swept down the corridor, trouser suit swishing gently, with no fewer than nine people. It looked like a bus queue that had got lost. I have seen African dictators with fewer hangers-on.

Ms Smith instantly impresses as a performer. She has a fantastic poker face. I think Gordon Brown has banned Cabinet ministers from visiting supercasinos but I’m sure Ms Smith could clean up in Vegas. Perhaps one day she will write The Bluffer’s Guide to Being Home Secretary.

There was only one problem and, technically, it had nothing to do with her. Her problem was her facts. They let her down. She didn’t have the ones she needed and the ones she did have seemed to have escaped from an entirely different side of the argument.

This problem first became obvious when Keith Vaz, the extremely grand and oleaginous chairman, noted that the consultation period over whether to extend the 28-day pre-charge detention period to 42 days had now ended. There had been 71 responses. So, he asked, how many had favoured extending the limit?

“Six did!” said Ms Smith. Six? Never has a number seemed more inadequate. There were more people in her entourage than those in favour of extending precharge detention. Her policy didn’t even have the gravitas of a bus queue. She looked utterly unperturbed by this, although she may have been swearing inwardly.

The session lurched along like a wonky wheelbarrow. She admitted that there had not been one case in which the police had asked for more than 28 days. She said this jauntily. There was, she insisted, a potential risk they would need more in the future.

Now it was the turn of David Winnick, a maverick Labour MP who, at 74, is impervious to pressure. He certainly wasn’t impressed by “potential risks” and was incandescent before he even began.

Did she think she could get it through? After all, at the consultation, only 6 out of 71 had been in favour.

“Yes,” she said, warbling about a “growing consensus”.

Well, if there is, it wasn’t growing in that room. Now a Tory named James Clappison piled in. He noted that, under the plan, if a suspect needed to be held longer than 28 days then this was to be debated by Parliament. But, the way the system was designed the debate wouldn’t take place until later.

“Do you accept that someone could be held up to 42 days before it came to the debate before Parliament?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said. Ms Smith said this with a straight face, as if it were perfectly normal for MPs to decide something that had already happened.

No one else in the room thought this normal. “It’s a meaningless vote!” insisted Mr Clappison. Mr Winnick shouted at her: “It’s a cosmetic exercise!”

Ms Smith’s fog machine (that must be why she needed such an entourage) began to fill up the room. “If you believe the voice of Parliament has a cosmetic effect on the executive, then I would disagree with you,” she noted with aplomb but not much logic. “I believe it is a strong measure of parliamentary pressure and an important safeguard.”

Mr Winnick, with his teeth glinting, interrupted. “Battles to come!” There was glee in his voice. Surely, the Home Secretary will need some new facts if she wants to win.

News Added: 12 December, 2007

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