I asked him whether things had changed once he became Home Secretary himself

I asked him whether things had changed once he became Home Secretary himself.Again with disarming candour, he said that there were times when it had not changed. As Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw said that he would sometimes turn on the Today programme in the morning and discover things that the Home Office was doing that he knew nothing about. As Harold Wilson’s first Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, once put it in plaintive internal memo: “Poor old Home Office – we aren’t always wrong, but we always get the blame.”One of the hardest things about running such a sprawling empire is to keep tabs on everything that is being done in your name. Although in the latter two cases their extramural activities involving, respectively, money and sex, had made them irresistible Aunt Sallies.And the ramshackle Home Office itself, with its 70,000 employees and annual budget of over £14bn, has long been a top target for the media and the public. Ted Heath’s man, Reggie Maudling, was excoriated by Private Eye and Paul Foot, and most recently David Blunkett was ridiculed in a More 4 satire. The accident-prone Henry Brooke – Home Secretary under Harold Macmillan – had been the regular target of David Frost’s weekly satirical show TW3. That can be an advantage in a department that is precedent-laden and casework driven.But if you seek to fend off attacks on you in Parliament and the media by deploying the worst lawyerly traits of splitting hairs and chopping logic, you will only make things worse for yourself.Howard was one of a string of Home Secretaries to be mercilessly lampooned – in A Very Open Prison on BBC TV.

He presided over a calamitous series of prison escapes and did himself no good by attempting to heap the blame on the head of the Prison Service Like many recent Home Secretaries, Howard was a lawyer. But there is no doubt at all, when it comes to the prison service, prayer has an important role to play.”Any prayers that Straw’s predecessor Michael Howard had offered up went unanswered. “Every Home Secretary does not just cross his fingers: you have to pray daily, light a candle and get down on your knees as far as the prisons are concerned And also make sensible policy decisions. At any time it may explode.”I put Baker’s view to Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary His frank response astonished me. And it’s not something you can simply pass by on the other side, saying, ‘I’m going to think about this every other Friday.’”Lord (Kenneth) Baker, John Major’s Home Secretary, says: “I think most Home Secretaries cross their fingers and hope that nothing’s going to go wrong in prisons while they’re Home Secretary – because there’s a cigarette paper’s difference between success and failure in administering prisons. Although most of your manpower and budget goes into managing them, you know that there no votes in prisons – both literally and metaphorically.

And you also know that any stage they can cost you your head.”It’s a very dramatic thing to go in to one of these huge Victorian prisons in the late afternoon with the darkness gathering about it,” says Lord Hurd “They are such a striking part of your job. “The climate of the Home Office was like that of summer storms blowing up absolutely out of a clear blue sky,” said Roy Jenkins, who served two terms as Labour Home Secretary. “And they were often very violent storms.” Or as others who have worked there graphically put it: the corridors of the Home Office are paved with dynamite.Prisons, as both John Reid and Charles Clarke realise only too well, are the most perilous part of the estate. But for all the prestige of running the ancient department of law and order, it can be the least glamorous of all Cabinet posts.”This is the job in which you get to know your own country most closely,” says Douglas Hurd, who was Home Secretary for four years under Margaret Thatcher. “You tend to see the bad bits of it, run-down housing estates, prisons, very complicated legal cases, riots, horrors of all kinds.”It is also the job which is perhaps the most politically exposed in government, for any part of your huge empire may suddenly hit the headlines.

As well as the core business of crime and punishment, immigration, asylum, terrorism and the police, the list includes nudist beaches, mad dogs, relations with the Royal Family, GMT, massage parlours, nuclear bunkers and ice-cream vans.The job of Home Secretary as the keeper of the Queen’s Peace goes back more than 200 years. I learned in the Home Office to touch wood in a way I never had to in any other department.”When you become Home Secretary, one of the things that can astonish the appointed person is the extraordinary range of responsibilities that the job carries. “When you are in the Home Office you never can absolutely sit back in your desk and say, ‘This is all going well,’” says the now Lord Wilson “You always have to say to yourself, ’so far’ You always have to touch wood. And the worst thing is that not only do you not know who they are, but they don’t know who they are.”The man who was Straw’s Sir Humphrey, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, (until he became Cabinet Secretary), was Richard Wilson. There aren’t many dark corners in the Home Office.”Jack Straw, who became New Labour’s first Home Secretary in 1997, says: “One of my predecessors gave me a gypsy’s warning about the Home Office: he said the key thing you’ve got to remember is that at any one time there will be 50 sets of officials working on projects that will undermine the government and destroy your political career. “And it’s a matter of luck, usually, whether you make your mistakes in a dark corner with nobody looking, or in the spotlight.

“It is probably the most dangerous job in government,” said Ken Clarke, who emerged unscathed from his 15-month tenure in 1993. Not so his successor, Michael Howard.”I don’t pretend that in four years in that demanding job I made no mistakes,” he says. A number of others have had to resign or had their political careers irreparably damaged by their time at the Home Office.
Over the years I have filmed and talked to many Home Secretaries and their officials to try and build up a picture of the job. For even though it is one of the glittering Great Offices of State, it can be a poisoned chalice. Only one of the 23 post-war Home Secretaries has gone on to become Prime Minister: Jim Callaghan. Dr John Reid has had a new job for every year that New Labour has been in power. But his ninth post, as Home Secretary, is the most hazardous of all.