All the same, it is a serious question: which vices should we want our politicians to have? The normative demands of politics are significantly different from those of everyday life, and this fact rubs up uncomfortably against the misguided, but popular, expectation that our politicians should not merely represent us, but resemble us too. This places MPs, especially senior ones, in something of a predicament: they must dissimulate so as to appear less exceptional, but at the same time prove themselves the only person fit for the job. The simulation of normality is something of a high-wire act not least because, as the current Tory leadership race is illustrating in real time, the imperative to present oneself as ordinary can take on a crazed, desperate quality, a neediness which strikes the rest of us as, well, slightly weird.

If readers want to be freed from the expectation that their politicians should be remotely like them and — even more so in this direction — vice versa, they might try reading Alan Clark’s Diaries.

Perhaps no one did more to reveal the deformations inherent in the political psyche. Entering the Commons in 1974, Clark must at first have seemed an archetype of the kind of wayward backbencher the Conservatives are generally better at producing then their opponents: unruly, temperamental, little-concerned for party discipline, more interested in being admired by a selective group of colleagues than liked by the elective public. He longed, however, for government position and the first volume of his Diaries, a bestseller in 1993, records his years spent as a Minister under Margaret Thatcher, first at the desultory Department of Employment (re-christened, by Clark, the “Department of Un-employment”), and later (much more to his taste) at the Ministry of Defence.

Diaries often provide a much more direct form of psychological access to their subjects than memoirs, and Clark’s are wildly unguarded. Take this entry, from 23rd June 1983, a mere ten days after Clark had first entered government. Surveying the street below his office balcony, he writes: “Sometimes I get a wild urge to relieve my bladder over it, splattinlgy on the ant-like crowds. Would this get one the sack? Probably not. It would have to be hushed up. Trivial, but at the same time bizarre… I might do it on my last day.”

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The whimsical delight in a mad fantasy of pointless transgression is Clark to a tee; not just the offence itself, but the school-boy glee at the thought of dower-faced officials, poor squares, frantically trying to keep up political appearances. As is often the case with Clark, the puzzle is not so much that he has these thoughts, but that he thinks it a good idea to write them down and collect them between hardcovers so that other people can read them. Still more, that he could do all this and then spend the next few years wondering self-pityingly why John Major hasn’t put him in the House of Lords yet.

Not everyone in government thought it better to have Clark in-the-tent-pissing-out. We quickly see why. The voice that emerges in the Diaries is spoilt, snobbish, monstrously vain, impulsive to the point of recklessness, hypochondriacal, sentimental, over-sexed, and completely unsparing of the feelings of others. Clark was an unusual composite of dispositions: a kind of Romantic Thatcherite.

“The Lady”, as he insisted on referring to her, always took his phone calls — immediately — and sturdily overlooked the fact that he was an obvious political liability. Clark would, for instance, go on Question Time and be mocked by Sue Lawley (whom he dismisses as a “silly bitch”) for refusing to defend his own government’s policy; or, as he did on one occasion, arrive at the dispatch box drunk after a wine tasting (“all marvellous bottles”) and give full show to his contempt for the illiterate speech his ministerial officials had prepared for him (“Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter? There was no shape to it”).

There is a rule of thumb about the wrecking of political careers: with Labour MPs the cause is invariably money, and with Tories, sex. Clark’s self-confessed “lecherous tendencies” provide that rule with a fat confirmatory data-point. He seems to have subscribed to a kind of vitalistic theory of machismo energy according to which his sexual and political potency rose and fell together, and was always very disheartened when he woke up without an erection. Ahead of the count for his Plymouth seat in 1983, and sensing victory, Clark contemplated his 22-year-old Labour opponent, Frances Holland: “I’m madly in love with Frances Holland. I suspect she’s not as thin and gawky as she seems. Her hair is always lovely and shiny. Perhaps I can distract her at the count on Thursday and kiss her in one of those big janitor’s cupboards.”

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The janitor’s cupboard. Not quite the electoral swing either party may have been hoping for. Clark can hardly look at a young woman without recording some version of the thought “pretty legs” or “phew-wotta-scorcher blonde with a lovely figure and lots of sparkle and confidence”. “I am interested in Clare, the au pair,” he writes. “I strolled over this evening, deliberately entered by the back door and chatted her up. She’s not pretty, but is sexual. Dairymaid.” He is randy to the point of self-parody, at funerals for colleagues murdered by the IRA (“the proximity of death always makes me sexual”), and at Christmas carol concerts (“I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this?”) Even watching Thatcher command the dispatch box he notices her “very small feet and attractive — not bony — ankles”.

In one spectacular confession of poor judgement, Clark appears to admit to an opportunistic hook-up on an outbound train from Waterloo: “[A] plump young lady came into my compartment at Waterloo. She was not wearing a bra, and her delightful globes bounced prominently… She was adorable. Am I crazy? Death wish? Above us in the Luggage rack the Red Box gleamed like a beacon.”

Old dogs can learn new tricks, however: later, as Defence Minister on a sojourn in Marrakesh, Clark turned down the tempting offer of an escort for the evening, with the jaded reflection that: “They’d be bound to take photographs, tape, video everything. For all I know, my bedroom has got a two-way mirror. So embarrassing for the dear PM — ‘I’m afraid it, er, looks as if Alan has been behaving, er, badly…’”

In fact, Sir Robert Armstrong, the head of the civil service at the time of Clark’s appointment to government, had worried openly that his libertine sexual practices made him a blackmail risk. Clark pointed out, somewhat persuasively, that blackmail is only an effective technique against those with some residual shame about the things that they do in private, and he had none. To this extent, his reputation for being accident-prone was ill-deserved. “A true gaffe is accidental,” Clark wrote. “Mine never are. I like to shock, and I do it (though not as often as I could) deliberately.”

All the same, can Clark possibly have meant to expose quite so much of himself? As is true of exhibitionists in general, he does not seem to find the right things embarrassing. It is no doubt true that the self-same qualities that made Clark a wonderful diarist also made him a rather lousy politician. But the notably cold-blooded regard he could have for others also left him with a very fine appreciative faculty, an “infallible eye for what is or is not political”.

His cursory portraits of colleagues are often particularly deadly, especially the ones that are supposed to be admiring. Jonathan Aitken is a “good friend and standby for many a dirty trick”. William Waldegrave is an “ambitious creep”, Ken Clarke, a “podgy life-insurance-risk”. “Norman Tebbit is truly formidable”, he records. “He radiates menace, but without being overtly aggressive… They arse-lick, massively, with Norman. Which he accepts, expressionlessly.” It is reassuring to hear a politician saying these things, not so much because they are intrinsically valuable insights, but because if they are not at least thinking them then they are not noticing enough.

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Clark’s “infallible eye” also gave him a very steady view of what the business of politics was. He understood that gossip, bitching, dirty tricks, hypocrisy and betrayal were not epiphenomenal to the practice — nor really dysfunctional — but actually constitutive of it. Finding that he had been artfully misled by a scheming colleague, he feels not frustration, but a kind of disinterested admiration of the kind a sportsman might feel on being outmanoeuvred by a defter opponent (“I like this. If you’re a serious player, it’s no good being ‘straight’. You just won’t last”).

He had no interest in appearing “normal”. He would, no doubt, have regarded the prospect with a kind of aesthetic distaste. His disinclination to conceal his strange feelings, to lie, curtail his dissipated life-style and toe the party line, arose not, it seems, from any conviction about the importance of honesty in political life, but from a protective attitude toward his own character, which he refused to reshape to better please the public. Clark never mastered the coded way in which politicians learn to reveal and conceal themselves, nor did he want to. As such, he remained an expert spectator, but poor player, of the game.

What should we make of politicians who actually excel at the kind of character-acting apparently required by their profession? Of course, those who speak too fluently in the Whitehall style can find that they are punished for their lifeless performances. And rightly so; at best, this is an uncreative way of disguising one’s unedifying character from the public. If Clark suffered with a form of exhibitionism, these personalities suffer with something akin to inhibitionism. A more fearful possibility is that such people really do have nothing to hide; a danger in selecting politicians who perform too slickly in the approved style is that you may end up with leaders, not with fewer vices, but simply very little self-knowledge.

As Levin warily observes in Anna Karenina the impulse to work for the public good can seem to reveal not a positive quality, but something more like an absence, a lack of some underlying conception of what one’s own life is about. Perhaps, as Denis Healey famously mooted, what a better class of politician most needs is indeed “hinterland”, but where this implies the existence not just of a reservoir of deeper commitment, but also a refined capacity to keep these potentially shadowy areas of one’s life just out of sight, off-stage, concealed in the darker regions of the political personality.

The polls tell the story. Prime Ministers with a disapproval rating of 70% rarely last long. Nobody defies gravity forever. Margaret Thatcher didn’t; nor did Tony Blair, despite winning three elections. Johnson has won only one. And the next test is not far away. On 5 May voters across the country will go to the polls in the local elections. A terrible set of results, and more letters of no-confidence will surely flood in. For Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and their rivals, the prize must seem so tantalisingly close…

And yet, and yet. Political history is littered with examples of potential leaders who struck too soon or waited too long, future England captains whose moment never came. Nobody remembers the R. A. Butler governments of the late Fifties and early Sixties, because they never happened. A decade later, Roy Jenkins sharpened the knife, raised it high about his head and prepared to plunge it deep into Harold Wilson’s back… but the blow never fell. And a decade after that, everybody knew Tony Benn was going to become Labour leader one day — but he never did.

The list goes on. Willie Whitelaw delayed and delayed, loyal to the last to the beleaguered Ted Heath, and then found himself overtaken by, of all things, a woman. Michael Heseltine timed his deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher to perfection, only to discover that many of his fellow Conservative MPs would never forgive him for it.

Kenneth Clarke won three separate parliamentary ballots in three different Tory leadership contests, yet never wore the crown. David Davis arrived at the Conservative conference as a runaway favourite with two busty women in T-shirts reading “It’s DD for me”, only to find that the party faithful preferred a smooth-talking shepherd’s-hut enthusiast instead. Even Boris Johnson’s first leadership bid exploded on the launch pad, sabotaged by his chief engineer.

And then there’s the most disastrous campaign of all, the Labour moderates’ risible attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016. “Angela is a star in the Labour firmament. She will be at my right hand throughout this contest and if I am successful, Angela will be alongside me as my right-hand woman.” The words of the future Labour leader Owen Smith, talking about his erstwhile rival Angela Eagle. That was just five-and-a-half years ago. Dame Angela is still there somewhere, lurking unnoticed on the backbenches. But poor Smith isn’t even an MP.

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It would be nice to claim there’s a clever formula for success, or to tease out some immutable “lessons from history”, but that would be disingenuous. There’s no formula. Indeed, the joy of political leadership campaigns is that nobody can quite predict the strange chemistry that makes a winner, the peculiar combination of luck and personality, the unforeseeable, unrepeatable point when man (or woman) meets moment.

Take Labour’s Roy Jenkins, the embodiment of metropolitan citizen-of-the-world liberalism, whose admirers often describe him as one of the best Prime Ministers Britain never had. In the spring of 1968, the only question was not if, but when. Following the humiliating devaluation of the pound a few months earlier, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, seemed crippled beyond recovery. The public had tired of his endless slipperiness, and as a smart and urbane crisis Chancellor — Rishi Sunak parallel alert! — Jenkins seemed the only plausible successor.

On the Labour benches Jenkins commanded what he called “a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism”. Their leaders reported that they had assembled an elaborate system of ‘dissident cells’ comprising more than a hundred supporters, as well as an ‘inner group’ who would co-ordinate the revolt. At a secret meeting on 17 June the chief plotters even produced a definitive list of some 120 potential rebels. All they needed was the signal to strike.

It never came. A couple of weeks later, Jenkins told them to hold off for the time being. The premiership was so close — but he “did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action”. A convicted assassin, he believed, would never wear the crown: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood”.

So Jenkins waited, and waited… and the moment passed. Wilson stayed on at Number 10 and Labour lost the next election. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jenkins lost his sheen. He went from tomorrow’s man to yesterday’s, without ever having been today’s. By the time Wilson retired in the spring of 1976, Jenkins’s chance had vanished. He had fallen out with the party’s Left wing over Europe, but there was a palpable sense, too, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Later, in his memoirs, Jenkins fell back on the excuse that he had never been ambitious enough, a clever way of complimenting himself for his own failure. But some of his supporters told a different story. “Roy was too ambitious, not insufficiently ambitious,” wrote his friend David Marquand. “He never thought it was the right moment; he always thought it was too risky”. The stakes were too high; he was paralysed by the fear of missing out. I wonder if, one day, Sunak’s friends will tell a similar story?

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What of Jenkins’s insistence that the assassin never wins the ultimate prize? Well, there’s always the lesson of Heseltine in 1990. But such a flamboyant showman would have been deeply distrusted by many Tory MPs even if he’d never lifted a finger against Margaret Thatcher. And there are plenty of telling examples of political hitmen who made it all the way. Stanley Baldwin, instrumental in terminating Austen Chamberlain’s leadership in 1922, became Tory leader himself two years later. And Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957 precisely because many Tory MPs thought that by knifing Eden in the back, he had showed the cold, single-minded ruthlessness that Rab Butler lacked.

Then there’s the best-known political assassin of all, an object lesson in pitiless opportunism. Margaret Thatcher had spent the first four years of the Seventies nodding and smiling at Ted Heath’s policy U-turns. Not once had she whispered a word of dissent. And when, after the second general election of 1974, she announced that she was challenging him for the leadership, nobody seriously thought she would win.

The story goes that when, as a courtesy, Thatcher visited Heath to warn him of her intentions, he said coldly: “You’ll lose.” The Conservative parliamentary party, agreed his old rival Enoch Powell, “wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent”. Even Mrs Thatcher’s family thought she was wasting her time. “You must be out of your mind,” remarked her husband Denis, not entirely supportively. “You haven’t got a hope.”

Yet as it turned out, Thatcher beat Heath by 130 votes to 119. (“A black day,” declared another of his old rivals, Reginald Maudling.) And now the strange magic of leadership contests took effect. With Heath gone, four new contenders, notably his lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, threw their hats into the ring. But it was too late; all the momentum lay with Thatcher. As the Telegraph remarked, it looked as if “a whole herd of fainthearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader” and then “ganged up to deny her her just reward”. When the second ballot was held a week later, she stormed to victory. “My God!” exclaimed one Tory vice-chairman when the news came through. “The bitch has won!”

The other great canard about leadership elections is that you should keep an eye on the dark horse, with John Major’s victory in 1990 as Exhibit A. But was Major such a dark horse? He was, after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer, having just served a short stint as Foreign Secretary. It’s true that if the leadership election had been held a year or two earlier, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Major had timed his run to perfection, his victory a perfect example of how, in politics, you make your own luck. It would have been easy for him to waver in 1990: to bide his time and sit this one out. But he calculated, quite rightly, that he would never have a better chance. With cool, understated efficiency, he took it.

In reality, most dark horses never come remotely close to winning, and many soon relapse into utter obscurity. Who now recalls Peter Lilley’s leadership pitch in 1997? How many people look back on Michael Ancram as the great lost leader of 2001? Is there, perhaps, some parallel world in which Stephen Crabb faced Liam Fox in the final round of the Tory contest in 2016? Can there really be a universe where Mark Harper battled Esther McVey for the crown three years later?

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Yet all of these people, presumably, must have imagined the pieces slotting into place: their colleagues marvelling at their unexpected talents, the other contenders falling away, the momentum sweeping them towards that historic audience at Buckingham Palace. Alas, it almost never works out that way. If you enter the contest as an outsider, you’re probably doomed before you start, because most MPs like backing winners.

A good example is one of the most colourful dark horses in modern political history, the hard-drinking, grammar-school-smiting Labour intellectual Tony Crosland. When Wilson resigned in 1976, Crosland fancied his chances. He looked at his rivals. Jim Callaghan, the favourite: too old. Michael Foot: too Left-wing. Roy Jenkins: too Right-wing. Denis Healey: too arrogant. Tony Benn: too mad. And it all seemed so straightforward. One by one the others would blow up, and Crosland would come through the middle.

So the future Prime Minister summoned his protégé, Roy Hattersley, who would surely play a key role in the victorious campaign. They got straight down to business. The most important thing, Crosland said, was to get a “decent vote” in the first ballot, and build strength from there. “I take it you’ll vote for me.”

Silence. Then, at last, Hattersley confessed. He didn’t want to waste his vote, and had already promised to back Callaghan. Crosland couldn’t believe his ears. It was all falling apart, and the campaign had barely started. “You’ll not vote for me?” he said. “Then fuck off.”

Crosland finished dead last in the 1976 leadership election, with just 19 votes. And the winner? Callaghan, just as everybody had predicted. Dark horses aren’t dark horses by accident. Favourites are favourites for a reason.

So are there no lessons at all for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — or for Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and the host of other putative dark horses? Well, here are a few thoughts. Most politicians only get one chance. Miss your moment, and it never comes again. Courage is usually more admirable — and more effective — than caution. If you do stand, don’t say anything stupid. Ideally, don’t say anything at all.

None of this is very helpful, I know — not least because there are so many obvious exceptions. So to finish, here’s one ironclad rule of leadership contests, which may not be what the current hopefuls want to hear.

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By Aris Roussinos

Really, honestly, it would be better to lose. Losers always have more fun. Just ask yourself: would Roy Jenkins have been able to enjoy quite so many agreeable three-course dinners if he’d been Prime Minister? Or would he rather have been defending the Government’s policy on salmonella? Would Denis Healey have been free to appear on TV with Roger Moore and Dame Edna Everage? Or would he rather have been at a meeting in Frankfurt with Helmut Kohl? Would Ken Clarke have been happier organising a junior ministerial appointment for John Bercow, or smoking his fifth cigar of the night in some West End jazz club?

For this is the great unspoken truth about leadership contests: it’s a competition to see who’s going to be the most despised person in the country in a couple of years’ time. Yes, you get to have your picture on the Downing Street stairs, just along from Gordon Brown and Theresa May. But as they would surely tell you, being Prime Minister is awful. Everything goes wrong, and everybody hates you. So instead of agonising about when to declare and what to say, just don’t do it. You’ll have a much happier life if you stay out, and the country will thank you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. Liz, Rishi: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Perhaps we have progressed less than we like to think over the ensuing centuries. Our prisons currently hold more people than those elsewhere in Western Europe. The Netherlands, among other nations, has found that big reductions in incarceration rates makes little difference to crime levels, while freeing up more cash to challenge underlying social problems.

On his trips, Howard discovered prisoners cooped in cells all day; today, many are still locked up almost round the clock. His legacy led to pioneering prison legislation and building of hygienic new units with single cells — yet now many inmates must still eat, sleep and defecate confined in cramped, shared rooms.

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Our prisons are a national disgrace. We have a motley collection of 135 institutions crowded with often-damaged individuals who are being warehoused, either temporarily or permanently, out of sight from the rest of us. Many inmates have chaotic backgrounds, mental health conditions or learning disabilities. Most are detained for non-violent offences. Yet they are stuffed in places where violence is rife, drug use routine, suicide rates rising and self-harm running at horrific levels. Few of their fellow citizens seem to care what goes on behind the barbed wire and high walls, yet even the chief inspector of prisons warns they have “appalling living conditions” and “lack access to meaningful rehabilitative activity”.

Now there is fresh focus on the prison system after another terrorist attack — and this time by a jihadist fanatic who exploited efforts to help offenders back into the community. Usman Khan was freed under licence a year ago, seven years into a jail term for joining a bomb plot. He killed two young Cambridge graduates, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, who were filled with benevolent compassion for those less fortunate and attending an event run by a prison-based education project.

To underscore the complexities of these issues, those who thwarted Khan with such bravery included a man guilty of the most sickening murder of a young disabled woman, who was out on day release. “He is not a hero,” said one relative of the victim.

Most politicians know prison does not work, except as cruel punishment, given that recidivism rates run at almost 50% after one year — a rate significantly worse than in those nations which incarcerate fewer and focus instead on fixing distresses that can drive people to crime. Obviously the public must be kept safe, but a succession of Tory justice ministers have admitted that our wider incarceration policies have failed; one even said the system has become an unsustainable waste of money. Yet despite the prison population running at near-record levels, Boris Johnson has reverted to the jaded old narrative of trying to look tough on crime and demanding even more people are locked up in this atrocious system — as seen again of the weekend.

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So the Conservative election manifesto may be slim, but it still finds room for a barrage of populist stunts on law and order. Prominent among them is the creation of another 10,000 prison places, frittering away billions to add another 12% to prison capacity. There will be life without parole for child murderers, which takes away a judge’s ability to show the slightest mercy for, say, a severely depressed mother who kills her baby. There is a pledge to double maximum sentences for assaults on workers in the emergency services, although it is only 14 months since the last doubling of punishment for this offence. More stop and search, fresh action on knife crime (although prison sentences for possession have doubled in length over a decade) and yes, even that hoary old chestnut of ‘tougher’ community sentences.

This all smacks of sad throwback to the days of Tony Blair, whose desperation to shore up his right flank led to the absurdity of 28 criminal justice bills in 13 years of government and one new offence added to the statute book for every day in office.

There is a reason Johnson brushed aside the pleas of one grieving parent not to exploit his son’s death for political capital and instantly demanded that terrorists should no longer be eligible for early release as the blame game erupted. For law and order is  a key part of his strategy to tilt his party towards those who voted Brexit, often in traditional Labour heartlands of the Midlands and North. It fits with evidence that asking people if killers should be hanged or crooks whipped was among the best indicators of how someone voted in the referendum. More than half of Leave voters and Tory members back restoration of the death penalty.

These socially conservative, hardline attitudes highlight why Johnson has resorted to tired old tropes — and why Priti Patel, who backed the death penalty herself until recently, was appointed Home Secretary to re-assure these key voters. It explains why Justice Secretary Robert Buckland was over-ruled when trying to resist another pointless law on assaulting emergency workers created to please the police. And why Buckland had to dump progressive plans drawn up by his predecessor, David Gauke, to follow Scotland’s lead in scrapping short sentences, which simply destroy any stability in an offender’s life and have the highest rates of recidivism. So we carry on disrupting the lives of 10,000 people a year by pointlessly sending them to prison for less than a month.

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Johnson’s calculating stance corrodes his claim to be a One Nation Conservative. He is exploiting the misfortunes of vulnerable people — and indeed, of taxpayers forced to stump up £41,136 a year for each person kept behind bars. Only three months ago, the Ministry of Justice was predicting the prison population would fall slightly over the next five years. The House of Commons justice committee, chaired by Tory MP Bob Neill, last month slammed “policy by press notice” when warning the prison system in England and Wales was in an “appalling” crisis, lacking any decency or security. Sentence inflation due to headline-grabbing stunts has seen average custodial terms surge from 13.3 months to 17.3 months over a decade.

Prisons pick up the pieces from societal failure. Some violent and persistent crooks deserve to be in jail, of course, along with those set on jihadist terror — although even they can change their ways. But more than a quarter of inmates are from ethnic minorities, indicating wider structural racism.at least one-third have a learning disability, highlighting the dreadful lack of community support and crumbling social care system. Almost two-thirds have a reading age of 11 or lower, underscoring the scale of school failures and impact of family breakdown.

Seven in ten jailed men have mental health issues while women are at least six times more likely to display symptoms of psychosis than in the general public, more signs of the dire state of mental health care. I have also come across distressing cases of autistic people, their needs ignored or misunderstood by the authorities, ending up behind bars although this only intensifies their stress.

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Yet once again we see self-serving politicians using such people as political pawns. This is a shame since some Tory justice secretaries from differing wings of the party — Ken Clarke, Michael Gove and Gauke — understood the urgent need for reform. They realised it is tougher to force citizens to confront demons of addiction, mental health struggles and educational failure than to leave them stoned all day in cells watching television.

Many conservatives in the United States have also come to see it makes no sense to keep locking up rising numbers of damaged or vulnerable citizens — whether on fiscal, humane, redemptive or criminal justice terms. I even took Gove to Texas for a BBC Panorama documentary examining the ‘Right-on-Crime’ movement that has swept the Republican party, prioritising rehabilitation over punishment and attempting to close the revolving door of imprisonment.

No such luck in Britain. Tory politicians just keep playing to the gallery regardless of the evidence and judges are forced to send people to prison for longer and longer sentences, filling up the cells with an ageing as well as expanding population. It is, of course, even harder to assess and monitor the small number of jailed people like Khan — reportedly numbering about 220 — amid such chaos.

The sad truth is many of the issues identified by John Howard back in the 18th century remain valid today: overcrowded cells, squalid conditions, poor healthcare, outbreaks of violence and lingering boredom. Yet now people are handed longer sentences, many prisons are swamped by drugs and we have made big leaps in understanding human psychology.

Our greatest prison reformer wrote in his book, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, that “those gentlemen who, when they are told of the misery which our prisoners suffer, content themselves with saying ‘let them take care to keep out…’, forget the vicissitudes of human affairs; the unexpected changes to which men are liable”. Clearly human nature remains the same.

The abject state of our bursting prisons still shames our nation — yet once again our leaders focus only on building more holding pens for vulnerable human beings rather than tackling the problems that can lead damaged people into entanglement with the criminal justice system.