Eight days ago Susan Hemming, a lawyer from the Crown Prosecution Service, announced that 11 of the 24 initial suspects in the international terror alert of August 10 were to be charged formally. Part of her purpose was to answer concerns that little evidence had been gathered against the suspects. It is now clear that her appearance — in the sort of role hitherto performed by senior police officers — was also intended to draw attention to a wholesale reinvention of the CPS.

As we report today, Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has used strikingly blunt language to condemn not only the legal establishment for its treatment of victims of crime, but also his own agency for failing to win broad public confidence. He has accused “fundamentalist” criminal lawyers of caring only about defendants’ rights and of “patronising vulnerable victims of crime with inflexible platitudes”. The notion of justice as a concept immune from public influence was “elitist and obscurantist”. And he has found Britain’s entire prosecutorial system guilty of a “unique failure”, among comparable jurisdictions, to muster meaningful power or citizens’ respect.

The remarks were made as the Government embarked on its debate about rebalancing a criminal justice system seen as favouring defendants at all costs. Some policies arising from this debate are uncontroversial. The ending of automatic sentence reductions for guilty pleas, and measures to keep victims of certain crimes, especially rape, apart from the accused during trial are welcome if overdue. The terms of the debate are fraught, however. There is no doubt that many, especially on council estates poisoned by graffiti and gang violence, feel let down by the authorities when they become victims of crime. But criminal justice is not a zero-sum game in which defendants’ rights are protected only at victims’ expense, and ministers who suggest that it is, including Tony Blair and John Reid, the Home Secretary, are flirting with a dangerous sort of populism.

Mr Macdonald’s intervention is different. It is partisan, but reflects a case that needs to be made. Because of its history as a notionally independent body, but one that was powerless to choose which cases to prosecute, the CPS came to be seen as an obstacle to justice in its running battles with police. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 granted the final say over which cases went to court, so it at last had a chance to boost the proportion of cases won by dropping weak ones early and pursuing others with suitable rigour and resources. The upshot would be a respected champion within the criminal justice system not just for victims of crime but also for the public at large, with all the muscle of the US system of district attorneys, but less of the politicking.

It is no secret that David Blunkett the former Home Secretary considered the CPS dangerously weakened by its own uncertainty as to whether it should be a neutral force for justice or a representative force for the public. He floated the idea of renaming the service the Public Prosecution Service, with the “public” conspicuously replacing the Crown. This would be a step too far; the money and effort are better spent prosecuting criminals. But his instincts were sound. The criminal justice system as a whole seeks justice; the CPS should be an adversarial force for the public within it.