Imagine the scene. It’s Friday morning and the new Secretary of State for Justice, Shabanna Mahmood, has just slipped into the big chair. Her predecessor has left her a note on the desk, ‘I’m afraid there is no cell space. Kind regards – and good luck! Alex.’

With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and new jails still on the far horizon, the first priority of the new Lord Chancellor is to stop the criminal justice system grinding to a halt. Keir Starmer, aware that the shelf life of ‘inherited mess’ will be brutally short, has gone on TV to prepare public opinion for the emergency early release of prisoners to continue and go even further. The party’s tough on crime poetry pre-election will collide with the prosaic reality of full, anarchic prisons.

We are on the brink of gridlock in our criminal justice system

Starmer will want to avoid scenes at all costs where people convicted of serious crimes are being bussed in circles around the M25 until an establishment can be found to shoehorn them in. The responses to a crisis 25 years in the making – the criminalisation of more and more people outstripping the capacity to house them – have become increasingly urgent in the election period.

The names given to the prison service’s progressively more desperate ‘operations’ to keep the lights on have acquired ever more portentous monikers. Operation ‘Safeguard’ means that convicted prisoners are held in police custody suites. Good luck with that if there’s a major disorder........

© The Spectator