Charles Clarke

Charles Rodway Clarke (born 21 September, 1950) is a British Labour Party politician. He has been Member of Parliament for Norwich South since 1997 and was Home Secretary from December 2004 until May 2006.

Background and early career

The son of Civil Service Permanent Secretary Sir Richard Clarke, Charles Clarke was born in London. He attended Highgate School where he was Head Boy. He then read Mathematics and Economics at King's College, Cambridge, where he also served as the President of the Cambridge Students' Union. He went on to become President of the National Union of Students from 1975 to 1977.

He was elected as a local councillor in the London Borough of Hackney, being Chair of its Housing Committee and Vice-Chair of economic development from 1980 to 1986. He worked as a researcher, and later Chief of Staff, for Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock from 1981 to 1992. His association with Kinnock and with the general election defeat in 1992 was expected to handicap him in his career, but after a period in the private sector - from 1992 to 1997, he was chief executive of Quality Public Affairs, a public affairs management consultancy - he emerged as a high flyer.

MP and minister

Elected to the British House of Commons in the Labour landslide of 1997, Clarke served less than a year on the back benches before joining the government as a junior education minister in July 1998. He moved to the Home Office in 1999 and joined the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and Party Chair after the 2001 general election.

He returned to Education as Secretary of State on 24 October, 2002 after the resignation of Estelle Morris. As Education Secretary, he defended Oxbridge, encouraged the establishment of specialist secondary schools, and (allegedly) suggested that the state should not fund "unproductive" humanities research. His view of universities could be seen as either impressively bold or overly instrumental. In 2003, he boiled down the point of all higher education to one simple sentence when he announced: "Universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change". He also oversaw the introduction of Bills to enable universities in the UK to charge top-up fees, despite a Labour manifesto commitment not to introduce such fees.

In 2004 he became a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society to acknowledge its contribution to education and in memory of his father, who had been a statistician.

Home Secretary

Following the first resignation of David Blunkett on 15 December 2004, Clarke took over at the Home Office as Home Secretary, one of the most senior positions in the Cabinet. He has recently been at the centre of much controversy regarding his proposed plans for countering terrorism. Critics suggest that his reforms to the judicial system undermine centuries of British legal precedent dating back to the 1215 Magna Carta, particularly the right to a fair trial and trial by jury. He was also criticised for continuing to push through the Identity Cards Bill, seen by some as serious infringement of privacy. Clarke ceased to be a Minister and returned to the government backbenches on 5 May 2006.

During the 2005 UK Presidency of the European Union, Clarke pressed other member states to pass a directive to require communications data to be stored for law enforcement purposes. The directive was criticised as infringing civil liberties and privacy, and critics also noted that the directive had been approved very quickly.

Clarke married Carol Pearson in 1984. They have two sons and live in Norwich.

Clarke speaks Cuban Spanish (a legacy of his student links with Cuba), French, and German.

Foreign prisoners scandal

On 25 April, 2006 it emerged that 1,023 foreign prisoners had been freed without being considered for deportation. Among the offenders, five had been convicted of committing sex offences on children, seven had served time for other sex offences, 57 for violent offences and two for manslaughter. There were also 41 burglars, 20 drug importers, 54 convicted of assault and 27 of indecent assault. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett commented that “Heads should roll” over the scandal, despite the fact that many of the releases occurred during his period as Home Secretary (see ^*).

The Home Office later revealed that of those, 288 were released from prison between August 2005 and March 2006 - suggesting the problem continued after it had been raised with the government. The National Audit Office told ministers last July that preparations to remove foreign criminals from the UK should begin "much earlier", and not be left until the end of their prison sentences. Clarke said: "It is a massive issue and it's true to say, with the vast growth of foreign national prisoners, we took our eye off the ball. "The first priority at this moment is to get the situation under control - that is what I'm focusing on. "We don't know exactly where everybody is ... I know where about 100 of those 1,000 now are, and we are going through the most urgent cases" (see^*).

It has subsequently emerged that some of those released then committed further crimes in Britain (see ^*).

Out of Government

The foreign prisoners scandal led many to call for Clarke's resignation, not only from the opposition; Clarke reportedly offered to resign, but Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to accept. However, in the wake of a poor Labour performance in the local council elections of 4 May, 2006, Clarke was axed in the biggest cabinet upheavel in the history of the Blair Government, to be replaced by Defence Secretary John Reid. Having reputedly turned down the offer of other positions by Blair, Clarke is now a backbencher.

At the end of June 2006, he did a series of interviews in which he criticised John Reid for claiming that the Home Office was "unfit for purpose", and that the Prime Minister ought to have defended him to enable him to continue seeing through the reforms he had initiated when first appointed to the post. However, he did state that although Tony Blair had lost his sense of purpose, he wanted to see Blair continue as PM.

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