Matthew Norman: Gordon has shown who's really in charge

Would you believe it, he can be decisive after all. OK, he likes to dither a bit over such trifling matters as whether to finish off a fatally wounded Tony Blair or call a general election. Yet most of us struggle with the trivia (I can spend two hours picking out a tie), and when it comes to the things that really matter, Gordon Brown proved this week that he can make up his mind in a flash.

Invited by John Humphrys on Wednesday's Today programme to explain how he's fulfilled last summer's promise to introduce radical change, he had already cited his intention to make hospitals cleaner (in stark contradiction of the previous commitment to filthy 'em up even more) when he moved to his personal intervention of the previous afternoon to veto the prisoners' pay rise. In approximately 0.07 seconds, Gordon examined the plan to raise it to a weekly £5.50 and judged that it should remain where it has been for the last decade, at a princely £4. Change Through Stasis, now there's a slogan for all New Labourites to rally behind.

The fact that the proposal came from the prison system management was irrelevant. The opinion of a spokesman for The Prison Governors Association that the extra £1.50 – almost a shilling an hour – would allow inmates to spend a little more time on the phone to their families, maintaining the contact regarded as so central to their chances of going straight when released, counted for nought. For goodness sake, you felt, haven't these so-called experts been reading the papers?

Those of us who have will know that the latest model from Nokia is regulation issue on the breakfast tray, delivered each morning at 9.30 sharp by the valet, alongside the Earl Grey, the kedgeree, the freshly ironed copy of The Independent, three lovely ladies from the escort agency patronised by Earl Laidlaw and a family-size phial of medical grade heroin.

I'm being facetious of course. In Belmarsh and one or two other Category A nicks, they have to make do with PG Tips (although no doubt Shami Chakrabarti will be off to Strasbourg about that soon enough). But tea leaves apart, everyone agrees that the experience of the British con today makes the domestic life of a senior bod in the Raj seem like solitary in Alcatraz during an outbreak of avian flu.

Before we go on, and in the strict interests of fairness, it must be stated that Gordon has instituted one crucial change since taking over, and this explains his unwonted foray into the world of the snap judgment. Where Tony Blair lived in mortal fear of offending The Sun, Gordon is petrified of the Daily Mail. The primary responsibility for directing British government policy that devolved to Rupert Murdoch for 10 years now falls to Paul Dacre, the Mail's mannerly editor and by many leagues the most formidable journalist of his generation.

Just as Gordon has chosen to ignore all expert advice about reclassifying cannabis to assuage the wrath of Mr Dacre, no fan of the heavenly herb, so his quick decision to abandon that lavish inmate's wage hike of a shilling an hour rested solely on the fear of council and mayoral election voters waking to the headline "So Now They're Paying Them Like City Fat Cats!" on the Mail's front page.

With so much else to choose from, perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh on him over this one. Even so, it is tempting to wonder where Young Gordon was all those Sabbath mornings when his dad preached about the message of redemption and the Christian duty to treat sinners with kindness in the hope that they repenteth. In his pulpit, Rev Brown must have dwelt once or twice on the thief on the cross next to Jesus, to whom the Son of Man spake saying: "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43).

Gordon wouldn't be the first Anglo-American politician to claim not to have been in the pew when distasteful sermons were intoned, of course, and even if Father Brown was hardly a proto-Jeremiah Wright he must have expressed thoughts unpalatable to readers of the Daily Mail.

Politically, then, Gordon was wise to stop the pay rise, because the general British attitude to offenders is as brutal and vindictive as it is pig-headed and self-defeating. If a study were published tomorrow establishing beyond the tiniest doubt that awarding the extra £1.50 would reduce reoffending rates by 60 per cent, and save an annual £6bn for an outlay of £6m, the phone-ins and blogs would still resound to that ritual hunting cry of political correctness gone mad, from representatives of the vast majority of voters who favour the reintroduction of capital punishment, however incontrovertibly proven its worthlessness as a deterrent may be.

In no area other than its kissing cousin known as "the war against drugs" do senior politicians deliberately follow a more self-destructive path than with penal policy. They know full well that the Dutch and Scandinavian model, with its emphasis on humane treatment and education, is most effective at rehabilitating.

They know that America, with its insanely draconian sentencing policy, savage penitentiaries and a higher per capita prison population than the USSR under Stalin, has rather higher crime rates than Holland and Denmark. They fully appreciate the waste of money and human potential the current policy represents. And still they follow Michael Howard's mendacious mantra that "Prison Works" like retarded sheep.

It would be faux naïf to affect the hope that we will ever elect a Prime Minister (or not elect one as in Gordon's case) with the moral courage to challenge this lunacy head on. The plain and gruesome facts will remain that our politicians are too institutionally craven and our tabloids too mightily influential to allow the remotest possibility of that. For what very little it's likely to prove worth, Gordon probably saved himself a few council seats by revealing the full extent of his weakness in the cause of acting tough.

But is it too much to expect that in a few weeks, on a good day to bury bad news, he will permit some trifling figure, in the department known by the Newspeak of the age as the Ministry of Justice to whisper it abroad that the prisoners of Britain will have their extra £1.50 a week after all, to spend on subsidised Iranian Beluga, Savile Row suits, Limoges porcelains, flatscreen tellies and all the other luxuries that inveigle thousands of citizens to tunnel their way into Wandsworth, Dartmoor and Parkhurst every day?

Who knows, one or two cons might splurge on a sachet of shampoo (not provided, oddly enough, by our penal Ritzes), or even a phonecard with which to keep alive their relationship with spouses and children or make contact with someone who might one day offer them a job.

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