CHARLES CLARKE has watched and waited in the 54 days since Tony Blair sacked him as Home Secretary. So wrong did Mr Clarke think that decision that he refused all other offers thrown at him to stay in the Cabinet.

He has watched with growing anger as his successor and old friend John Reid has rubbished the department he inherited from Mr Clarke and, by implication, his record. Today, in an interview with The Times, Mr Clarke breaks his silence with a ferocious onslaught on Mr Reid’s conduct and a passionate defence of his achievements. Most worrying of all for No 10, he gives a devastating critique of the current state of Mr Blair’s premiership and raises serious questions about the Prime Minister’s ability to give Labour back a sense of purpose and direction. He said he is speaking out because “I feel I have to defend my own reputation as Home Secretary”.

Mr Clarke began by telling us that events had shown that he was right to fight for his job after Mr Blair told him that he had to go because of the scandal of foreign prisoners being released without consideration of deportation. He had agreed when he was appointed that he would have three or four years in the job, implementing a programme of reform throughout the Home Office’s three key divisions: prisons, immigration and the police. By removing him, he said, Mr Blair had stalled the reform progress because of the diversion of the prisoners fiasco and because he feared that the local election results were going to be worse than they turned out to be.

He said: “When I was appointed in 2005 we agreed it would take three or four years to make the changes that were necessary. We knew there would be ups and downs and I don’t think it was right for me to leave at that time. I do not think the fears that there would be some great scandal coming round the corner that would knock me out in relation to foreign national prisoners was right.”

He then made a scornful assessment of his successor’s style and conduct as he resisted the suggestion that he would have had to go anyway if he had survived the prisoner problem. Most damaging was Mr Reid’s use of the phrase “not fit for purpose”, which Mr Clarke believes has rebounded disastrously. It was not correct in any case, he said, but it has also “put the spotlight on what our enemies would claim is the failure of nine years of Tony Blair’s leadership — tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.

The subsequent problems are not of his making, he suggested, and he is in no mood to take the blame for them. “It was not me that said the Home Office is not fit for purpose. It was not me that went down the whole process of suggesting there were people throughout the Home Office who ought to be sacked. In fact I made major changes at the top of the Home Office by appointing a new permanent secretary and other senior staff.

“Many of the issues that have arisen since I left are a direct outcome of decisions taken by the current Home Secretary. That is a matter for him. I don’t want to go down a process of just saying he has not got it right. But I certainly don’t accept these things would have happened if I had been there.”

In a reference to the way a tabloid treated an interview with Mr Reid, known as the Cabinet Enforcer, Mr Clarke warmed to his theme: “I never used the phrase, ‘I am the enforcer’. I never showed up at an immigration department raid. I did not believe in that style of doing things.

“It is a perfectly legitimate style if you want to behave like that. It was not my style and I am not going to take responsibility for those things that derive from that style rather than from the way I decided I would do it.”

Different home secretaries have different ways of dealing with the media, he said, in another gibe at Mr Reid. “Mine was different from David Blunkett. His was different to Jack Straw’s. Both, all of ours, are different to John Reid’s. I make no criticisms of that. They are different.”

He hopes that Mr Reid, a friend since 1974, will remain so but he will not take the blame for his behaviour. “I am not going to take responsibility for the consequences of the current Home Secretary’s style. I will take responsibility for what I did and how I did it. I am not going to take responsibility for the way issues are being dealt with now.”

Home secretaries had to decide their style. “The slogan I used for myself was ‘tough, but not populist’. It is not a trivial point because the way the tabloids operate it is easy to play a populist agenda and I think it is quite dangerous to do so. John has decided his image for himself as Home Secretary. Image is more important in home secretaries than in most other ministries. John has to decide how to do it. I hope we remain friends. I have always been a friend and political ally of John. I respect him a great deal.”

Mr Clarke conceded that there were real problems at the Home Office but said that he had embarked on a five-year strategy to put them right, citing advances over a new points system for immigration, electronic borders, police restructuring and greater public protection from dangerous criminals.

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