By Chris Mason
Political editor, BBC News
“You’re only ever one day away from disaster.”
That is how one senior figure at Westminster has described what it’s like to be a cabinet minister.
Just such a jaw dropping moment has come for the Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, when he was told about the astonishing sequence of events at Wandsworth Prison in south London.
A terror suspect dressed in a chef’s outfit had managed to get out jail by clinging to the underside of a food delivery van.
As gobsmacking as it is absurd.
Prisoners escaping is rare.
Escapes from prisons – as opposed to from prison vans, for instance – are rarer still.
And escapes by terror suspects from prison very rare indeed.
All of which means the Governor of Wandsworth Prison will face the most awkward and excruciating of questions about how on earth this was able to happen.
I’m told an urgent call was set up between Mr Chalk and the prison governor, where those questions were posed.
Senior officials from the Prison and Probation Service were also on the call and the minister, as you might imagine, “sought assurances the jail was now secure,” as one source put it to me.
The decisions that came next followed established procedures and were taken not by ministers, but by others: police forces around the country sharing information, and Border Force being told about Daniel Abed Khalife in case he was was trying to flee the country.
The intelligence services are also likely to be involved.
By the afternoon, with no sign of him, there were appeals to the public to call 999 if he was seen.
By the evening, the justice secretary had ordered an investigation into how Daniel Abed Khalife managed to escape.
Why was he being held at a Category B prison rather than a high-security Category A prison, such as Belmarsh in south east London?
Were normal procedures being followed at the time of the escape, and if not, why not?
But there is another element to all of this: the politics.
Labour’s only just appointed shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmood claimed that the criminal justice system was in “a state of disrepair”.
And the Labour MP whose patch includes Wandsworth Prison, Rosena Allin-Khan, claimed the jail is “chronically understaffed”.
She cited data she had secured from the government at the beginning of this year, which showed that on one day last December around a third of the shifts that needed covering by prison officers during the day were unfilled.
This was after offering staff overtime to work extra shifts.
She also pointed out that in November last year there was also a disruption to the water supply to the prison for more than a week, meaning bottled water had to be supplied and “the prison implemented a restriction on access to showers and provided water to enable flushing of toilets,” the government had acknowledged.
A government source said the figures suggesting the prison was short-staffed was “a snapshot” and said the number of frontline prison officers recruited increased by 20% in the year to June 2023 – to 4,898.
The source added: “We are recruiting up to 5,000 additional prison officers across public and private prisons by the mid-2020s.”
