Evil Surfer

Trailing behind him was a plastic bag full of rubbish that he carries everywhere, like a security blanket He didn’t know where he was or why he was in there At one point, he thought I was his father. The doctors agreed he had irreversible brain damage, the result of failing to take his epilepsy medication. He was 45, but as he shuffled into the room he looked 65, with a tight hunch and, I soon discovered, early onset dementia. On a visit to Wormwood Scrubs last year, for example, I discovered it was largely an ill-equipped warehouse for the mentally ill.

On one ward, I met Anthony, a man who was sent to Scrubs six months before, after being found walking naked around his south London neighbourhood. They need to listen to us more, not get rid of us.” It’s true – if you look through the stacks of inspectors’ reports, the inspectors were frantically pointing successive Home Secretaries towards the political minefield of foreign prisoners for years.Anybody who has spent time in Britain’s prisons can see the need for independent inspectors with a dark black clarity. If you don’t gather the right evidence, you’ll put in the wrong solutions. I was warning them for bloody ages about the problem with foreign prisoners, and so was [Anne Owers, his predecessor]. He is a military man who served in Northern Ireland and the Falklands, and he has the restrained, clipped tones of an army general.

But when he speaks about the Government’s new proposals, his military reserve melts away The new plan is, he says, “obscene” and “despicable”. He tells me: “At a time when the Home Office is in complete disarray, the Government is sweeping away one of the few effective rocks of stability in the system.”Once you start making inspectors what the Government wants them to be, that’s the slippery slope to disaster Ministers will no longer hear awkward truths They will hear what they want to hear. All these inspectorates consist of insiders, people who come from the field they are inspecting and may go back to it. They work inside government and sit on panels with ministers. They offer friendly advice, not the brave expos?(and bad headlines) that are necessary in a system that holds absolute power over its inmates.Lord David Ramsbottom, our former chief inspector of prisons, is not a man prone to exaggeration or hyperbole. They will be subject to political pressures and political whims.You can understand the kind of inspectors the Government has in mind by looking at the inspectorates they are being grouped with in this new department – the people who watch over the courts, police and probation officers.

At first glance, this might not sound so bad – but instead of being independent, reporting directly to the public about the service we pay for, the new prisons inspectors will work “as directed by ministers”. I was a very happy producer-director on World in Action, but I decided I would like to have a baby. I wasn’t going out with anyone, so I planned my pregnancy and now I plan our life together. With a baby, I knew I needed to get an office job and in TV one of the best ways to do that is to become the boss! In my job, you meet all sorts of fascinating men – Chief Buthelezi, John Prescott, Piers Morgan – but they are not always available My daughter Hettie comes up with ideas. She suggested I marry Bin Laden – I talked about him so much, she assumed I was keen on him.

Now she thinks a husband might get in the way, but I think he could be handy A man who could do science homework would be ideal. SUSANNA SIMPSON, 28 Founder, Limelight PR and PR Week Young PR Professional of the Year in 2003Being single was hugely advantageous in setting up my business because it takes so much work, focus and long hours. The media industry is very sociable and there are lots of evening events, so I’m probably out two or three evenings every week. You’ve got to have a partner who understands that you are going to be socialising some evenings It’s probably not the best industry for jealous boyfriends. I don’t worry about being single at all, as I meet lots of people through my job Maybe in 10 years’ time if I’m still single, I will worry. ANNIE MILES, 52 Director of independent production company Talent Kids and ex-managing director of Fox Kids in the UKThe reason why a relationship never happened for me was because I didn’t put enough into relationships But I’m not sure I wanted to. That is not something I could have admitted to myself when I was younger, because of the pressure to conform.