LAST MONTH Justice Secretary Robert Buckland announced that Charlie Taylor, an Eton contemporary of David Cameron and long-running Tory special adviser, is the new Chief Inspector of Prisons. 

The Prisons Inspector has to be independent of government, but Taylor’s long association with the Conservatives makes this appointment look cronyish.

Taylor was head of a small school for children with special needs in 2011 when Michael Gove employed him as a special adviser.

Taylor has always had quite a bit of support in the press, but I am sceptical of some of their claims on his behalf. 

Taylor became head a primary school for kids with special needs in Hillingdon with under 30 pupils in 2000. 

Taylor persuaded the press he had worked wonders with the Willows School. According to the Daily Mail, Taylor “turned around a former sink school in north-west London.”

Taylor told the Guardian that the Willows was a “war zone” when he arrived. In the Standard, Taylor said: “When I first came in 2006 it was incredibly violent here,” suggesting he had “transformed” the school. 

This kind of coverage reappears throughout Taylor’s career — many of these stories resurfaced in 2016. 

But I am not convinced they properly describe what happened.

It is true that Ofsted gave the Willows an “Outstanding” mark in 2006, a few months after Taylor became head, and another “Outstanding” mark in 2010. 

But in 2002 Ofsted also found the Willows was “a good school with excellent and very good features.” 

The inspectors found “behaviour, in and out of classrooms,” was “very good: the clear structures and high expectations ensure that behaviour is generally very good. Procedures to manage poor behaviours are very well developed and appropriately implemented.” 

When Ofsted inspected the school in 2006 it did praise Taylor’s “very clear vision for school improvement,” but also noted that the Willows was already “judged to be a good school with excellent features at its last inspection and many of its robust systems and practices were still in place” when Taylor took over. 

There is no doubt that working in special needs education is challenging, but the record doesn’t seem to match the claims about Taylor’s transformation.

Taylor served as Gove’s special adviser from 2011-12. Then Gove made Taylor chief executive of (since closed) quango, the National College for Teaching and Leadership. 

In this role Taylor was in charge of teacher training, with a mandate to introduce School Direct. 

This scheme allows schools to train their own teachers. Gove wanted Taylor to push the scheme because he said university-based teacher training was dominated by what he called a Marxist “Blob.” 

In the CV Taylor presented to MPs as part of his Prisons Inspector appointment, Taylor boasts that he helped hit the target for “half of all teachers” being trained by School Direct by 2015 — this is true, but it is also true that this was at the cost of overall teacher recruitment.

The government has missed its target for teacher training for every year since School Direct was introduced. 

Universities still provide about half of all trainee teachers, so it is a good thing Taylor wasn’t able to fulfil Gove’s original ambition to completely replace the university schemes with School Direct, or teacher shortages would be much worse.

In 2015 Gove became justice secretary, and Taylor moved into a new job as a director of the Ministry of Justice and then, in 2017, chair of the Youth Justice Board. 

Taylor has relied on Gove’s patronage, but this does at least give him experience of the justice system. 

Taylor’s justice record is mixed. In 2016 he wrote a government-commissioned report on youth justice, with recommendations for trying to keep kids out of custody and offer young offenders better education, which was widely welcomed. 

However, when Taylor actually took charge at the Youth Justice Board, it issued new “standards” for how young offenders should be treated. 

The simplified standards, launched in 2018, were criticised by prison reform figures as “vague” and “too loose” to ensure proper treatment and support of young offenders. 

Taylor told MPs he would “speak independently “and “be absolutely frank” as Chief Prisons Inspector, but as he owes his career so much to this government, it’s hard to be confident he will. 

By putting a former ministerial special adviser into this supposedly independent position, the Conservatives are again showing they want to use their big majority to reshape the state, baking the influence of their party into the supposedly “non-political” bits of government.

Cashing in on the pandemic

BIG stores that made big profits during the Covid-19 crisis, but still took government subsidy, are under fire — even from fellow retail bosses.

B&M is a discount retailer, one of those big sheds that sells homewares cheap. 

Because it sells food, B&M was allowed to stay open as an “essential retailer.” 

But it also sells toys, furniture, soft furnishings and all sorts of homewares, so while other non-food stores were closed, B&M boomed. 

So much so that it is paying a £250 million “special dividend” to investors. That includes £37m to Simon and Bobby Arora, the brothers who founded B&M.

They cashed in on the pandemic. But they didn’t just get extra customers, they got extra subsidy. 

B&M has returned its £3.7m furlough cash to the government, which is fair enough. 

But it is hanging on to their much bigger government subsidy. Like all shops, it was given relief from business rates — worth a whopping £38m. 

The Arora brothers are taking almost as many millions out of B&M as the government put into B&M as a Covid-19 tax break.

Some of the big supermarkets, like Sainsbury’s and Tesco, also made extra profits because they were allowed to stay open as “essential shops” where other stores closed. But they  are also hanging onto the business rates relief subsidy.

It’s so bad that one retail boss, John Roberts of electronics online retailer AO World, was shocked.  

His firm’s sales went up, so he returned both the firm’s furlough cash and its business rates relief. 

He told The Times that the retail executives in similar positions who hung onto rates relief “should go and ask their mum if she would be proud.”

So will there be pressure on the Chancellor to take this windfall money back off retailers? 

I would think not: in 2019 Anglesource, a company controlled by B&M boss Simon Arora, became a new, £50,000 donor to the Tory Party.