Mr Lewis, with his belief in the importance of modern management techniques, was a keen supporter of this principle. Its managers are meant to be left with as much freedom as possible, the better to promote efficiency in a businesslike environment. They believe that the issues raised by the Learmont report, the sacking of Mr Lewis and his subsequent writ, need to be addressed urgently.As one of the 100 or so “Next Steps” agencies, the Prison Service is supposed to have been distanced from politics. A third, Sir Duncan Nichol, former chief executive of the NHS, is expected to have harsh words to say when he returns from holiday in Spain. Before he left he warned that it would be severely damaging if Mr Lewis were fired as a result of the Learmont report.Such people do not regard the matter as closed by Mr Howard’s devastating performance in the Commons. Even Joe Pilling, the career civil servant who had been expected to get the top prisons job in 1993, wrote to express his sympathy.The Prison Board, which manages the service, was also appalled.

Two non- executive directors who, like Mr Lewis, are from the private sector and not the Home Office’s “liberal establishment”, resigned. Even though he is scarcely one of their own, not only has the union taken up his case, but he has received dozens of letters of support from mandarins. Tory backbenchers roared, Mr Howard’s career was saved and Labour, from Tony Blair down, was left wondering what had hit them.To some, however, the events at Westminster were a gaudy, noisy irrelevance. Liz Symons, general secretary of the Association of First Division Civil Servants, which represents Mr Lewis, said the Commons may have been good theatre, but it had not examined the evidence.Few civil servants accept the view that Mr Lewis is merely a bad loser. A measure of their feeling is to be seen in their response to his sacking. All who watched agreed that Mr Howard knocked Jack Straw, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, all over the chamber. The charges from Mr Lewis were “the spleen of a bitter man”, the Home Secretary said, and Labour had shown itself unfit for government by repeating them.

In his place, they say, there appears a more ethereal figure responsible only for high political theory, not the low business of implementation.When last week he was asked if he should not resign, Mr Howard replied: “Sir John has not found that any policy decision of mine directly or indirectly caused the escape.” The failings were operational failings and not policy failings, so they were nothing to do with him.Last Thursday’s events in the House of Commons appeared to vindicate him. Their scope for presenting the public with criticisms about a jail will be drastically cut.So what happens when something goes wrong – or when everything goes wrong, as Sir John Learmont found everything had at Parkhurst in January? His critics say that the omnipotent Mr Howard – the Mr Howard who constantly wants to tell the police, the judges and the prison governors what to do – simply disappears. His friends said he would have stayed on if Mr Howard had offered to extend his contract, but Mr Howard was only too happy to see him go.Meanwhile boards of visitors, which inspect jails and issue public reports on their conditions, are being brought under strict Home Office control. Last month Mr Howard “gave him a rocket”, according to Home Office sources, saying he would not tolerate Sir Peter becoming a commentator on penal affairs.Judge Stephen Tumim, whose elegant and occasionally caustic reports made him a national figure, retires as Chief Inspector of Prisons next month He was, in effect, fired. In such cases the Home Secretary decides when prisoners are to be released, so in effect he is fixing the true length of sentences, and not the judges.And in the prison service, which has never enjoyed much freedom, Mr Howard and his ministers are still intimately involved in decision-making.His power is increasing; what about responsibility? For some time he has been doing his best to restrain or silence the few independent bodies whose task is to monitor his department.For example the efforts of the ombudsman, Sir Peter Woodhead, to ensure that prisoners are treated fairly and consistently have not brought him thanks. At the same time, the extension of mandatory life sentences which he has ordered will erode the independent power of the judiciary. Though they came from a most unexpected quarter, these charges went straight to the heart of a problem that is causing growing concern: ministers’ responsibility to Parliament and the public for what goes on in their departments, and above all for what happens in the new “agencies” springing up everywhere in Whitehall.Are ministers, as they insist, only accountable for “policy” and not “operational” failures? If so, does that mean they now wield power without responsibility?IT IS no accident that this issue came to a head in the Home Office, even if Mr Lewis is an unlikely cause celebre, for Mr Howard’s power is growing almost by the day.Performance indicators set by his department will soon be used to determine police priorities across the country, giving him greater control over what used to be semi-autonomous police forces than any home secretary before him.

Instead of fuming in private, he hired a public relations firm to put his case. Instead of keeping his head down and hoping his silence would be rewarded with another top civil service job, he fired off a writ for damages against Mr Howard which read like a charge sheet.It accused Mr Howard of daily political interference, “extreme and unjustified” pressures and delays in making important decisions. The Government, it seemed, had every right to be pleased.But on Monday, when he was fired after the damning Learmont report on the Parkhurst prison breakout, Mr Lewis revealed another side of business culture. Under his workaholic direction, the prison service saw not a single serious riot, while the number of escapes dropped like a stone. In particular, he began implementing the Government’s controversial policy of privatising jails.
And, despite predictions of disaster, he enjoyed some success.

Once installed (at a salary double his predecessor’s), he set to work with the familiar, bright-eyed conviction that he was “invigorating” an under-performing monopoly. He got the job because he had the background ministers now consider vital in running public services: he was a businessman. Derek Lewis did not become director-general of the Prison Service because he knew about jails – the only jail he had visited before 1993 was on a Monopoly board. THE Home Secretary, Michael Howard, came under attack last week from a man who had seemed a model member of the Conservatives’ new establishment. I was stuck on this journey by the unsettling thought that if, in 1959, I’d met myself as a 50-year-old, I would be meeting someone who could tell me their memories of the Armistice and the General Strike; and not only tell, but perhaps also bore.The reference to Take It From Here in my speech at Bristol, before an audience with a probable average age of 23, was thus yet another mistake.. The train glides along the river in its gorge for an hour or two, and through the window you can see schlosses on hilltops and dozens of ships and barges nosing into the current or swinging downstream What has changed is me. You expect it on the New York subway but not, for all the usual national preconceptions, on expresses that run along the Rhine, and that have restaurant cars and smart lady ticket inspectors who speak English: “I am sorry, but you are not in the correct seat.”The last time I went down the Rhine by train was as a 14-year-old on a school trip in 1959 I was as entranced by it this month as I was 36 years ago.