The Law is not so small a world that everyone in it knows everyone else. It does, however, contain large networks of acquaintance, and reputations travel through them. I had heard of Michael Howard before I met him in the early 1980s. Nothing I had heard prepared me for the man in person—the smug and whining moralism of his voice; the imperfectly acquired mannerisms of a class to which he plainly did not belong; his apparent unawareness of those small courtesies that are difficult to specify but which distinguish a learned profession from a curse on the public. I speak as a member of a profession never famous for its devotion to soap and water. Even so, I came away from my one encounter with Mr Howard feeling the strong need of a bath.

It is with this recollection in mind that I turn to his article in The Daily Telegraph of the 26th August 2026. He complains that a BBC Radio Four series about the decline of crime has misrepresented his record as Home Secretary in the Major Government between 1993 and 1997, and that he was given no opportunity to put his side of the argument.

Let me begin with a concession. The BBC operates under the guise of public-service broadcasting while conducting psychological warfare against the British people. Everyone knows this, and I see no need to rehearse the evidence. It lies habitually—unless it happens to tell the truth by accident, or because some isolated truth is useful in the service of a greater lie. Its dominant assumptions are managerial and authoritarian. Its idea of balance is to arrange a controlled dispute between two varieties of the same approved opinion.

I have not listened to the programmes that have so disturbed Mr Howard. I do not doubt that they were tendentious. Nor do I doubt that the BBC should have offered him an opportunity to answer any direct criticism of his conduct in office. An organisation that endlessly congratulates itself on its impartiality ought at least to observe the ordinary rules of natural justice.

But agreeing that the BBC is dishonest does not oblige me to sympathise with every one of its victims. If an habitual liar accuses a notorious scoundrel of some offence, the liar’s character does not confer innocence on the accused. Were I to listen to the programmes in question, I might conclude only that the BBC had missed a splendid opportunity to damn a most infamous man by telling the truth about him. The relevant truth is that, of all the Home Secretaries of the past half-century, Michael Howard did more than any other to lay the foundations of the police state in which we now live.

Mr Howard’s defence is that recorded crime fell while he was Home Secretary. He tells us that when he entered the Home Office, its officials assured him that crime had risen for fifty years, would continue to rise and could not be reduced. He refused to accept their advice. When he left office, he says, “nearly a million fewer crimes were committed annually” than when he had arrived. This may be so. Statistics of crime are notoriously difficult to interpret, but let us accept his figure for the sake of argument. What follows from it? Very little is the answer. Crime may be reduced in many ways. It can be reduced by better locks, stronger doors, improved vehicle immobilisers, cheaper burglar alarms, the legalisation of drugs, greater freedom of self-defence or more certain punishment after conviction. It can also be reduced by tattooing a number on every forehead, installing a camera in every room, abolishing trial by jury and allowing the police to beat confessions out of suspects. The existence of a desired result tells us nothing by itself about the justice or wisdom of the means used to achieve it. Before we congratulate a politician for reducing crime, we must ask how much he reduced it, whether his measures caused the reduction, what other causes were operating, and what price was paid in liberty.

Mr Howard does not ask these questions. He simply recites a list of his measures and invites us to admire him. Consider his partial abolition of the right to silence. He says:

“As many police officers told me, this change significantly increased the number of criminals who pleaded guilty rather than contesting their trial.”

“One policeman told me” is anecdote. “Many police officers told me” is a larger quantity of anecdote. Neither is evidence sufficient to establish the wisdom of a fundamental change to the criminal law. No doubt the change persuaded some guilty men to plead guilty. It may also have helped convict others who deserved conviction. That is not the only consideration. The old right to silence expressed a principle at the heart of English liberty: it is for the authorities to prove guilt. The defendant is not required to assist the prosecution or to prove his innocence. Silence is not evidence of guilt because an innocent man, confronted by hostile questioning and uncertain of the significance of his words, may have every reason to keep his mouth shut.

Mr Howard thinks this principle less important than making convictions easier to obtain. His example is a burglar who claims at trial that he entered a house in the belief that it belonged to his brother-in-law. The example is carefully chosen. We are not asked to imagine an innocent suspect who is frightened, confused, badly advised or distrustful of the police. We are invited to picture a plainly guilty burglar telling a ridiculous lie. This is how attacks on liberty are usually sold. A general protection is discussed only in relation to the least attractive person who might rely on it. The jury trial is judged by the acquittal of a thug. Privacy is judged by the concealment of a terrorist. Freedom of speech is judged by the ravings of a lunatic. Once the protection has been weakened, however, it is weakened for everyone.

Then there is CCTV. Mr Howard writes:

“This had the effect both of deterring criminals from committing crimes knowing they would be caught on camera, and making it easier to apprehend those who were not deterred.”

This is assertion dressed as demonstration. The early cameras were often useless for identifying anyone. Long before the technology improved, criminals had learned to cover their faces, avoid the cameras or take other elementary precautions. Some crimes may have been displaced from watched streets into unwatched ones. Some offenders may have been caught. None of this establishes that mass surveillance was either necessary or proportionate.

Its more important effect has been cultural. For a generation, the British people have been trained to accept that they are permanently under observation. We walk beneath cameras owned by the police, councils, transport authorities and private companies. Our movements are recorded, retained, searched and increasingly joined to other records. Even where no substantive act has yet been forbidden, surveillance changes behaviour. It teaches us that whatever we do in public may be logged, interpreted and one day used against us. There is a difference between being seen by other people and being watched by an institution. Human observation is limited by memory, attention and mortality. Institutional surveillance creates permanent records. It turns the ordinary citizen from a person going about his lawful business into a data object whose movements can be reconstructed at the pleasure of authority. Mr Howard appears to regard this transformation as an unmixed good because a few more thieves may have been photographed.

He next boasts of establishing “the first national DNA database in the world.” One can almost hear the pride with which some ancient despot might have announced the world’s most comprehensive network of informers. DNA evidence can be useful in establishing guilt or innocence in particular cases. That does not answer the objection to collecting and retaining biological identifiers on a mass scale. A database created for serious crime will not remain confined to serious crime. A database covering convicted offenders will expand to arrested persons. Information gathered for one stated purpose will be made available for others. This is not some fevered prediction about a remote totalitarian future. It is the normal behaviour of administrative systems. Once information exists, every department that can invent a plausible reason for access will demand it.

Nor should we forget that databases contain errors. Samples are contaminated; labels are confused; records are wrongly entered; interpretations are mistaken. The aura of scientific certainty surrounding DNA may make such errors more dangerous, not less. A jury that would treat uncertain eyewitness testimony with caution may be overwhelmed by the announcement of a “match.”

The argument for a comprehensive DNA database is that it would make solving some crimes easier. Of course it would. So would universal house searches. So would compulsory tracking implants. So would abolishing private correspondence. The question is not whether a measure would assist the police. Almost every abolition of liberty would assist the police. The question is whether the assistance is worth the moral and constitutional cost.

Mr Howard’s enthusiasm for identity cards belongs to the same mentality. Identity cards are repeatedly proposed as a remedy for crime, illegal immigration, terrorism, benefit fraud, under-age purchases and whatever other anxiety happens to dominate the newspapers. The particular justification varies; the institutional appetite remains. Their practical benefits are usually exaggerated. Criminals can forge documents. Terrorists can acquire genuine ones under false or unsuspected identities. Most benefit fraud is not a matter of simple impersonation. Conmen already pretend to be officials who themselves carry identification; their victims are deceived because they do not ask to see it or cannot reliably judge whether it is genuine.

But the practical objections are secondary. The central objection is that an identity card is not just a piece of plastic. In the modern world it is a key to interconnected databases. It links the person standing before an official to records of residence, employment, tax, travel, health, finance and possibly much else besides. Once a universal identifier has been accepted, the pressures for further sharing become irresistible. Why should the police not see a suspect’s travel records? Why should an immigration official not inspect his employment history? Why should a hospital not verify his immigration status? Why should an insurer not examine his medical records? Why should the authorities not compare purchases, movements and associations in search of “risk”? Every extension will be presented as modest, reasonable and useful. Every safeguard will be described as sacred until some emergency makes it inconvenient. No single change need look like tyranny. The final structure may nevertheless be tyrannical.

Mr Howard also returns, inevitably, to his famous claim that “prison works.” In one narrow sense, this is true. A burglar locked in a cell cannot burgle my house while he remains there. A murderer who is hanged will have a most pleasingly low rate of reoffending. Incapacitation works by definition. But Mr Howard wants much more than this modest truth. He wants the slogan to support the suggestion that his penal policy caused the national fall in crime. That requires evidence, not a play on words. It requires him to distinguish between competing causes. During the 1990s, cars became harder to steal. Burglar alarms became cheaper. Electronic goods declined in value, reducing the profit available from stealing and reselling them. Methods of payment changed. Patterns of household occupancy changed. Similar falls in crime occurred in places not governed by Michael Howard. It may be that imprisonment contributed to the decline. It may even have contributed substantially. But Mr Howard’s article does not prove this. It merely observes that two things happened during approximately the same period: his policies were introduced, and crime fell. This is the politician’s favourite argument. When favourable events coincide with his tenure, he caused them; when unfavourable events occur, they are the inheritance of his predecessor, the fault of the civil servants or the consequence of international forces beyond anyone’s control.

His final argument is that his reforms have remained in place for more than thirty years under governments of every party. He regards this as vindication. It is nothing of the sort.

Governments seldom surrender powers inherited from their predecessors. Labour did not repeal the machinery Mr Howard created because it found that machinery congenial. Later Conservative governments retained Labour’s additions for the same reason. The state is cumulative. Each administration complains about the powers of the other side while in opposition and gratefully takes possession of them after winning office. A measure does not become just because successive governments find it useful. By that test, income tax, wartime regulations and every durable administrative abuse would acquire moral legitimacy through age. The endurance of Mr Howard’s reforms proves only that politicians enjoy power and dislike returning it.

Compared with the carnival of authoritarianism that followed the September 2001 attacks, Mr Howard’s innovations may now look almost restrained. This is no defence. A man sentenced to a hundred lashes is in better condition after the first ten than after the final ten. That says nothing about the humanity of the man plying the whip. The machinery of surveillance, data retention and weakened procedural protection did not spring fully armed into existence after 2001. It was prepared by earlier governments and normalised by men who treated every objection as sentimental concern for criminals. Mr Howard helped establish the precedents. His successors expanded them. We now inhabit the result.

There is something almost charming in his complaint that the BBC has treated him unfairly. Here is a man who helped weaken the principle that the authorities must prove their case without assistance from the accused, now demanding the fullest procedural fairness when his own reputation is in the dock. Here is an architect of institutional suspicion insisting that he personally deserves the benefit of an answer. Here is a champion of official power discovering that large bureaucratic organisations can be selective and unjust. He is right, of course. He should have been allowed to answer. The BBC should observe its own rules. It should not misrepresent even Michael Howard. But I cannot join his lament.

The BBC is a dishonest organisation. Michael Howard is one of its victims. Both statements may be true without making him sympathetic. If the BBC has accused him inaccurately, let the record be corrected. There remains a formidable indictment that can be established without distortion: that he gloried in weakening ancient protections, extending surveillance and converting the presumption of innocence from a constitutional principle into an inconvenience to efficient prosecution.

His misfortune is not that the BBC has condemned him unfairly. It is that an honest account of his record would be more damning still.