CAN the British Home Secretary, Michael Howard, possibly be the caricature of a self-centred right-wing politician that he so often appears? Yes, according to the man who ran the British prisons service for him for more than two years, and who was dramatically sacked when a series of crises at the jails led to calls for the Home Secretary's own resignation in the autumn of 1995.

As he removed Derek Lewis from the post of director general of the prisons service, Howard made a celebrated distinction between prisons policy - for which he was responsible to parliament - and operations, which were Lewis's area. Howard's critics thought the Home Secretary simply shafted Lewis to save his own skin. That, not surprisingly, is also Lewis's view, bitterly retailed in Hidden Agendas.

Lewis is of interest because he was an outsider, a businessman brought in to head the new agency which the Conservative government established to run Britain's prisons. With the Irish Government currently planning a similar scheme, Lewis provides valuable insights into the inevitable conflicts which arise where the worlds of politics and criminal justice merge.

Lewis was a television executive when he was hired by Howard's predecessor, Kenneth Clarke. The jails were underfunded and overcrowded, and Clarke felt the system could be improved by private sector practices, and even privatisation.

At first all went well. Clarke kept out of the way as Lewis unravelled the red tape choking prison headquarters, his private sector eyebrows leaping into the air with every discovery - a disastrously expensive scheme here, a job fixed for an old boy there. Slowly he began, to impose his modern manager's ways on the lumbering bureaucracy.

But he learned soon enough where power really resides. In a telling passage he quotes Clarke, under political pressure to produce a new initiative against crime, declaring that a plan to increase the prisoner population by 5,000 must be announced at once.

Lewis realises no one has calculated the cost or cares for the damage the scheme will cause to his carefully crafted reforms, which depend on a period of population stability. "I felt quite powerless. I could not stop the plan," he writes.

When Howard became Home Secretary Lewis found life even more difficult. Howard's philosophy was that "prison works" and conditions should be "decent but austere". Lewis had been sailing on an opposite tack, stressing the value of rehabilitation.

Their differences were magnified by Howard's habit of unexpectedly announcing policy changes at party conferences, and by giving only limited public support to Lewis whenever there was a crisis - a riot, an escape or a politically inept prisoner transfer - in the service.

The inevitable clash came over a report on prisons prompted by an escape from Parkhurst Prison. Lewis found some recommendations unacceptable, but Howard wanted to accept them all, arguing that if he did not and there was another escape from Parkhurst, "I would have to resign."

Ultimately Howard fired Lewis, who resisted in the courts and won his pay-off.

It is disappointing to record that at the end of the book, Lewis recommends corporal punishment and hard labour as useful components of a penal system. He offers no research to support these methods, and as so much of the book is about cost and efficiency, he leaves the reader with the suspicion that he favours corporal punishment because it is so much cheaper than confinement.

But these thoughts are at odds with the generally humane tone of a book written in a crisp, journalistic style.

If the book has a flaw it is that Lewis, who promotes the idea of managers being held accountable for their actions, dwells too little on whether he bears any responsibility for the prison riots and escapes which form the background to his rows with the Home Office. But then, it is clear to the reader from the beginning that this will be a one-sided story. And for anyone interested in the politics of crime, it is an essential read. {CORRECTION} 9703080021