I was taking my morning espresso at a little place near the Royal Courts of Justice—the sort of establishment where one can still procure a proper flat white without being subjected to a lecture on the ethical sourcing of oat milk—when I saw the news. Ellie Reeves, our redoubtable Solicitor General, had declared herself officially "horrified." Naturally, my ears pricked up. I am a connoisseur of political horror, and I always like to know what is currently ruining the breakfasts of the great and the good.
The source of her dismay, it turned out, was the criminal justice system. Specifically, the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa, who murdered Henry Nowak and was handed a minimum jail term of 21 years. Reeves has referred this sentence to the Court of Appeal under the "unduly lenient sentence" scheme, citing her absolute revulsion at the brevity of the punishment.
I must confess, when I first read the number, I nearly choked on my biscotti. Twenty-one years. Say it out loud. It barely takes up a breath. Why, I have a pair of bespoke Church’s brogues that are older than 21 years, and they are only just beginning to break in properly across the instep. To sentence a man to a mere two decades and a year in a maximum-security facility is to essentially hand him a prolonged, state-funded sabbatical.
I am so glad we finally have a Solicitor General brave enough to say what we are all thinking: a quarter of a century in a cage is simply not enough time to make the rest of us feel better about ourselves.
Let us consider what 21 years actually means in the context of a full, vibrant life. It is nothing. I was speaking recently with a dear friend of mine, a rather senior King's Counsel whose name you would certainly recognize if I were crass enough to drop it in print, and we both agreed that a 21-year tariff is the judicial equivalent of an apologetic cough. You go in, you read a few books, you perhaps learn a trade like making license plates or whatever it is they do in Wandsworth these days, and before you know it, you are back on the streets, missing only the entirety of your youth, middle age, and the technological advancement of the human species.
For those of us who lead busy, productive lives, time moves swiftly. In the last 21 years, I have written four books, married twice, divorced once, acquired a rather challenging property in Tuscany, and learned to tolerate natural wine. The years have absolutely flown by. If I were told tomorrow that I had to spend the next 21 years in a cell, I would simply view it as an opportunity to finally get through the complete works of Marcel Proust. It is a gift of unstructured time that most overworked professionals in the City would pay tens of thousands of pounds for at a Swiss wellness clinic. The idea that we are punishing a man by giving him two decades of uninterrupted reflection is absurd. We are practically subsidizing a mindfulness retreat.
When one really thinks about it, a modern British prison is simply a state-sponsored boarding school without the rowing. You are given a room, meals are provided at regular intervals, and your social circle is rigorously curated by the state. I spent five years at a preparatory school in the Home Counties that had far stricter rules about lights-out than most Category A facilities, and the food was undeniably worse. We didn't complain. We didn't ask the government to intervene because the headmaster was unduly lenient on the boy who stole the chapel wine. We simply got on with it.
This is why the "unduly lenient sentence" scheme is such a magnificent piece of legislative theater. It allows politicians to look at a judge—a highly trained individual who has sat through weeks of agonizing evidence, weighed the complex mitigating and aggravating factors, and strictly applied the sentencing guidelines established by Parliament—and say, "No, I reckon that feels a bit light, actually."
It is the ultimate triumph of the vibe check over the rule of law, and I am entirely here for it. The law should not be a static, predictable thing based on precedent and statute. It should be a dynamic, emotional reaction to whatever happens to cross a minister's desk on a Monday morning when they are feeling a bit robust and need a quick headline in the evening standard.
A twenty-one year minimum term is barely enough time for the administrative paperwork to clear my desk, let alone provide the visceral, Old Testament retribution the voting public demands.
Let me tell you about a dinner I attended recently in Mayfair. I found myself seated next to a very prominent Home Office official. We were attempting to navigate a rather aggressive beef wellington, and the conversation naturally turned to the philosophy of sentencing. "The problem," he told me, gesturing with a silver fork, "is that the public has lost its appetite for medieval timescales."
He was right, of course. We have become terribly soft as a society. We look at a man facing 7,665 days of staring at a concrete wall, eating terrible institutional meals, and sleeping on a mattress thinner than a Sunday newspaper supplement, and we think, "Well, that seems quite bad." We forget that in a proper, functioning society, a prison sentence shouldn't just remove a person from the community; it should erase them from the very fabric of time.
Some bleeding-heart commentators would have you believe that 21 years is a severe deprivation of liberty. But they lack perspective. Have they ever tried to get a planning permit approved in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea? I have been waiting for a conservatory extension for what feels like 21 years. If I can endure that psychological torture, surely a convicted murderer can endure a few decades in Belmarsh without us all pretending it is a particularly harsh penalty.
The beauty of Ellie Reeves referring this case to the Court of Appeal is the clear message it sends to the judiciary. It tells them that they are being watched. It tells them that no matter how closely they follow the sentencing guidelines drafted by the very same legislative body Reeves belongs to, it will never be enough if the optics demand more.
I recall a conversation I had with a former Prime Minister—I won't say which one, but let's just say he had a fondness for classical antiquity and a very relaxed relationship with the truth—over a rather acceptable claret. He told me that the secret to a successful justice policy is incredibly simple: always make the numbers bigger. If the previous government gave ten years, you give fifteen. If they gave twenty, you give thirty.
It doesn't matter if the prisons are currently overflowing to the point where we are essentially storing inmates in broom closets. It doesn't matter if the sentences have long ceased to have any statistical deterrent effect on crime rates. What matters is the arithmetic of outrage. By looking at 21 years and saying "Not enough," Reeves is playing her part in the grand, historic pageant of British politics. She is demonstrating that she is tough, that she is serious, and most importantly, that she has not accidentally read any of the academic literature on penal reform.
The Court of Appeal will now have to review this sentence. Three judges, cloistered away in their gothic architectural splendour, will sit down and ponder the metaphysical weight of 21 years. These are men and women who measure time in centuries of legal precedent. To them, 1998 was essentially yesterday morning. You would think they, of all people, would understand that two decades is a mere blip. Yet, time and again, we see the judiciary handing down these sentences as if they are meaningful chunks of a human life.
It is infuriating. I was at a gala at the Tate Modern last month—an awful exhibition, just dreadful, but the canapés were passable—and I cornered a High Court judge near the coat check. I asked him point blank why they persist in this charade of proportionality. He mumbled something about "the constraints of the law" and "human rights," which is exactly the sort of bureaucratic excuse one expects from people who have lost the courage to be truly draconian.
Will the Court of Appeal add five years? Ten? Will they decide that Vickrum Digwa must serve 21 years, be briefly released to experience the crushing disappointment of modern society, and then be immediately re-incarcerated for another 21? One can only hope. We must stand with the Solicitor General in her horror. Because if we start believing that 21 years locked in a cage is a significant punishment, we might have to start asking difficult questions about what prisons are actually for, what society owes to its citizens, and how we address the root causes of violence.
And nobody, least of all me, wants to ruin a perfectly good lunch with questions like that.