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“... At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society ...”

“... influence, I have never believed it since conducting an interview with the then foreign secretary Jack Straw in 2004. Our interaction came at a moment when there was a slight difference in the line being taken by the Foreign Office and Number Ten about the various inquiries into Iraq – exactly the sort of thing BBC journalists were paid to niggle away ...”

“... two heroes.) It is possible that the extension of Myra Hindley’s sentence by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, will be deemed to contravene her human rights as defined by the European Convention that the Government is pledged to adopt as law. She may be released. Straw’s decision to reject her appeal for parole casts ...”

“... very badly on Howard. Ramsbotham’s departure six years later was less publicly acrimonious – Jack Straw simply announced his retirement without his having agreed to it – but Prisongate will make uncomfortable reading for ministers. It is a vivid and at times idiosyncratic account expressive in equal measure of personal frustration and moral ...”

“... after meeting the parents of Ben Kinsella, murdered at the age of 16, that the then home secretary Jack Straw extended the mandatory sentence for murder involving a knife to 25 years. Kinsella and his friends went out to celebrate after finishing their GCSEs. One of his friends had a disagreement with some men in a bar; one of the men, Jade ...”

“... and crime it would be much easier: James Purnell could continue to privatise everything and Jack Straw to build dozens of gigantic prisons. That at least has coherence. But the Labour Party has a history and an institutional memory, even to those who seem most oblivious of it. The fact is that Labour’s social-democratic past won’t go away, and ...”

“... are a price worth paying for the possibility of long-term benefits. It is not enough to argue, as Jack Straw did following the Madrid bombings, that ‘al-Qaida will go on and would have gone on irrespective of the war in Iraq, until they are firmly stopped.’ Nor is it enough to say, as he also said: ‘We did it for the best of motives.’ This is the ...”

“... circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and ...”

“... of terrorism, we think merely of evil and condemn all suspects by association. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, recently described the Home Office as having so vast a remit that it was impossible to keep fully abreast of all its work, and that political dynamite could emerge without warning at any time. This consultation paper belongs in that ...”

“... resting on someone else to respect it. When, in his recent Mackenzie-Stewart Lecture in Cambridge, Jack Straw, the minister of justice, quoted Tom Paine’s stirring remark, in Rights of Man, that ‘A Declaration of Rights is, by reciprocity, a Declaration of Duties also. Whatever is my right as a man, is also the right of another, and it becomes my duty ...”

“... We’re waiting on the front porch of Jack and Sonia Hatch’s three-storey home in Sherman Hill, a desirable district of Des Moines, Iowa. Pillars, parquet flooring, leftish middle-class clutter. It’s a fantastic, warm evening. About sixty of us, a handful of journalists, but mostly Sherman Hill residents, have come to see Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, New York Knicks professional basketball star and Rhodes scholar who wants the Democrats’ nomination for President of the United States ...”

“... Tony Blair (called to the Bar 1976) wanted to ‘derail the gravy train of legal aid’ and Jack Straw (called to the Bar 1972) complained of ‘BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers’. But New Labour’s attack wasn’t on the gravy train: it was on the ‘good’ lawyers, the ones who earn £25,000 a year helping the poorest, and the ones who ...”

“... danger of paying . . . the massive legal costs that would ratchet up against them.’ In 1995 Jack Straw described prison privatisation as ‘morally repugnant’ and said: ‘It is not appropriate for people to profit out of incarceration. This is surely one area where the free market does not exist.’ Shortly after taking office he gave the ...”

“... by the Red Cross about them in March; on his return to London, as the then foreign secretary Jack Straw admitted in a statement to the Commons that June, Rammell had briefed senior figures in the FCO. Then there was the government’s admission that it had made Diego Garcia available as a pit stop for extraordinary rendition flights after denials ...”

“... hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone crocodile. Joblard, Sinclair’s friend, arranges the cards so that they tell a story. At once they become scrutable: they are images of imperialism. Joblard titles this picture story, what else, ‘Heart of Darkness’. But the ...”