Michael Gove, in his new role as justice secretary and lord chancellor, is rapidly turning into a highly unlikely hero of the liberal left.

The credits had hardly finished rolling on Monday’s BBC Panorama, showcasing Gove’s summer study tour to Texas to see how they are cutting their burgeoning prison population, before fresh details of his cabinet battle over a Saudi prison contract emerged.

Unexpectedly, for those who have been following the affair, it seems to have been successful: the controversial contract with the Saudis has been cancelled, it emerged just before lunch.

As the Times reported this morning, the incoming justice secretary had demanded back in July that the Ministry of Justice’s £5.9m commercial bid to provide a “training-needs analysis” to the Saudi prison authorities should be scrapped.

This was said to be strongly resisted by the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, who argued that Britain’s wider interests would not be served by pulling out of the contract.

Gove did not just cross swords with Hammond at cabinet over the issue. He also circulated a cabinet memorandum on the human rights concerns of doing business with the Saudi prison authorities, who are also poised to carry out a sentence of execution by beheading on a civil rights protester who was just 17 at the time of his offence.

It is said that the dispute was also raised at the national security council and Hammond warned that it would leave Britain looking like an “untrustworthy ally” – for which read the move could jeopardise the flow of intelligence from the Saudis to the British military. An exchange of letters followed.

As the Times quoted one Whitehall source: “There was a robust exchange of views. The MoJ had human rights concerns: the Foreign Office felt this would have far bigger ramifications.”

In the event David Cameron was forced to intervene and - it had been believed - was came down on the side of Hammond: “Downing Street ruled that the Ministry of Justice must honour its bid. Unless something changes, Mr Gove will sign the contract any day now and British civil servants will spend six months working with one of the most barbaric prison systems in the world,” wrote the Times’s Rachel Sylvester.

So, Gove had wanted to drop the bid for the Saudi contract but had been overruled, and some of this appeared to have emerged publicly last month. MPs were told in September when parliament returned that the bid for the contract was continuing because the financial penalties involved in cancellation were too onerous. But when this was shown to be invalid the given reason was later amended to the “wider interests of the government”.

This was widely taken at the time to mean that Hammond had overruled Gove’s human rights concerns.

However, earlier in the day Whitehall sources were insisting on Tuesday morning that the prison contract is in fact not likely to be signed “any day now”. They would not, however, elucidate whether this delay was because the cabinet dispute was not yet over or because the Saudis were not yet ready to sign on the dotted line as well.

Whatever has precisely happened following the cabinet battle over this Saudi prison contract when it was played out behind the scenes back in July, Gove did however take one significant step. He announced in September the closure of the MoJ commercial arm, Justice Solutions International, which had been set up by his predecessor, Chris Grayling, to sell Britain’s expertise in prison and probation services to the rest of the world.

The result of this is that Gove, who needs urgently to build political support if he is to have any hope of delivering serious reform of the failing prison system, emerges as something of a human rights hero who fought the good fight.



But there remains one nagging doubt. There are serious liberal criminal justice commentators who have argued that engagement with the Saudis over prisons has merit. Rob Allen writes that help in “bringing about improvements in overseas prison systems [that] can reduce the risk of torture and ill treatment among detainees is a good thing in itself and part of our soft diplomacy”.

On the other side, Human Rights Watch argues that “quiet training programmes are not a substitute for active British engagement with the Saudi authorities on human rights abuses in the justice system”.

Quite so, but there are those who say that protesting against the executions and public floggings while training Saudi prison officers in human rights standards might actually make more of a difference.

