Ann Widdecombe, the former prisons minister, says she has documentary proof to back the allegation.
He hired another, a former prisons boss called Bernard Kerik, who turned out to be flamboyantly dodgy.
A former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me the state was now "racking and stacking" black Australians.
Brokenshire said the safety of the new restraint system had been assessed by an independent panel chaired by former prisons and probation ombudsman Stephen Shaw.
Truss says that former prisons at Dover and Haslar, Portsmouth, which have recently been immigration removal centres, will not be reopened as prisons.
Crispin Blunt, the former prisons minister, accused Gove of using Britain's national security council to promote "neocon" ideas that could encourage moderates to move towards Islamist extremism.
Among backers in the upper house are Lord Blair, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, Lord Woolf, the former lord chief justice, and Lord Ramsbotham, the former prisons inspector.
The theory seemed to some to have been proved when Crispin Blunt, the Reigate MP and former prisons minister, was challenged with a deselection attempt in September.
