Jack Straw

TO BRITAIN'S progressives these past four years he has been Mr Nasty Guy: the home secretary—in plain European, minister of the interior—who loved to keep out asylum-seekers; who smothered dreams of a genuine freedom-of-information law and brought in a phoney one; who wanted to limit the right to trial by jury and was already pushing up prisons like mushrooms to hold the startling number of Britons who are sent there anyway. He was also the minister who handled the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into British law. But he got little credit for that; it merely damned him in the eyes of conservatives who see the convention as a foreign plot to let crooks go free and give IRA gunmen compensation for not being arrested with kid gloves. And now, hey presto, Jack Straw has changed hats: out, a week ago, went the bug-eyed but Europhile Robin Cook, and in came Mr Straw to speak for Britain to the world. In particular, to the EU—a union for which, until now, he has expressed no visible enthusiasm whatever.