Tories must turn around overcrowded, cesspit prisons but Labour’s record on escapes is grim

Broken prison

THE movie-style jailbreak of terror suspect Daniel Khalife is a mind-boggling fiasco.

If it’s not exactly the last thing Rishi Sunak needed, it’s close.

Wandsworth jail is a filthy shambles, under-manned by guards whose morale is at rock-bottom.

Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has to turn it around — along with all our overcrowded, cesspit prisons — and improve staff retention across the service.

But no one yet knows if any of that was to blame for Khalife exiting beneath a catering van.

Labour, though, couldn’t wait.

On TV and radio, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper could not hide her ­desperation to blame the Government.

She wrongly said Khalife was transferred from Belmarsh to lower-security Wandsworth — then couldn’t say if she would have held him anywhere else.

She neglected to mention the terror suspects who vanished for good in 2007 under Labour’s feeble “control orders”.

Or that her party’s record on prison escapes, now extremely rare, was grim.

That was Labour in office, before it found its true calling: Noisy, cynical, facile opposition.

Eco maniacs

HOW can climate campaigners still not grasp that their phony extremism does the cause far more harm than good?

Just Stop Oil are trained to spout absurdities about “genocide” and “extinction”.

Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan justifies his Ulez tax on the poor by claiming 4,000 Londoners a year die early from pollution.

It is statistical mumbo-jumbo.

Channel 4’s Factcheck team calculate that imposing Ulez on outer London will add “just 13 minutes to a Londoner’s life expectancy this year”. Sure, if that.

Khan pretends this is “transformative”. Only to his empty coffers.

Now a top scientist admits overhyping the link between global warming and wildfires — omitting other causes like arson — claiming the journal Nature wouldn’t publish his study otherwise.

The eco movement rewards extremism.

But that hysteria erodes the patience of sensible, sane people who do have climate concerns . . . and whose support is vital.

A sad date

A YEAR ago we lost our beloved Queen.

The Royals lost their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and figurehead.

No one was sure what the future held without our nation’s rock of 70 years. But what a job they have done in her absence.

King Charles, with Camilla, is proving warm, dependable and popular. William, Kate and the kids have been stars.

Only Harry still casts a shadow, in his new life as professional complainant.

Every fresh outburst wounds his dad, brother and others.

Who can blame them for continuing to give him the cold shoulder?