Rory Stewart was prisons minister at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for around a year from April 2018. His memoir, Politics on the Edge, deals with more momentous elements of his career. But, it also contains four short chapters on his time in the ministry. Mr Stewart has some interesting lessons about a department that failed to impress him from the start with its architecture: ‘a brutalist tower…The windows were slits, set in sloping concrete shelves, like a stack of pillboxes designed to prevent incoming fire’. The lifts didn’t work properly either.
To be fair, the MoJ got the building from the Home Office for whom the defensive structure might have been more appropriate. The MoJ used to have smaller and more nondescript premises around Victoria. But the reason it was upgraded—at least in size—was its creation under Tony Blair by the absorption of Home Office responsibilities for prison and probation within the Lord Chancellor’s traditional responsibility for courts, the
