David Ramsbotham: a tribute
The first message I received this morning was a text to inform me David Ramsbotham had died.
General, Baron, Officer, life peer, David Ramsbotham was someone whose company, generosity, wit and endless passion for life, fairness and consistency I enjoyed over many years.
When I became CEO of Safe Ground, Lord Ramsbotham was a long standing patron. For years I was troubled by the etiquette of how I should address him, so avoided it as much as possible and made a joke of always greeting him with ‘Your Highness’ to cover my embarrassment and neither knowing what I should say nor how to ask for clarity. I eventually settled on ‘David’.
David was, in my 12 years of knowing him, a generous, funny, compassionate, engaging, charming and committed man with a range of passions and interests, a sophisticated appreciation of absurdity and a definite affinity for sarcasm. In many ways, my kind of guy.
He was enormously proud of and impassioned by his underrated, underused and out of fashion acronym, PANT. He would raise his voice and happily declare ‘People Are Not Things!’ over a cup of tea anywhere, be it the House of Lords or a coffee shop.
David was not a fan of command and control administration. Often he would decry the increasingly apparent tendency in public services (usually the Prison and Probation services in which he was well versed) to reduce agency and autonomy, thereby curtailing the skills, capabilities and purpose of people supposedly in place to deliver quality ‘on the ground’.
In my opinion, over the years, our frustration, cynicism and disappointment in the failures of the system grew, even if it was for slightly different reasons and analysis.
David had the kind of establishment profile and career history that could easily disqualify him from my mind as an important public figure. Had I not known the man and only read his obituary in The Times, I could (I am embarrassed to say) have overlooked his life as a model of embedded institutional pattern repeating itself.
My recent correspondence with David was more about ourselves as people than it was about work. The loss of his wife, about whom he cared deeply and to whom he was married for so long. The later loss of his mobility and voice and the changes to his lifestyle and activities. My own desire for him to really know how much his time, attention, wit and vitality had meant to me and to the organisation I loved and worked hard to sustain as a class leader.
Like so many of the people for whom he advocated change, David was perhaps, and at least once, an apologetically radical reformer. When he suggested release for the boys who killed Jamie Bulger at an appropriate and proper time he was, of course, challenging the fundamental premise of the very system that enabled his ascent.
Lots of people in prison are captured forever, crystallised as ‘prisoner, offender, thug or fraud’. David was not just a General, a Baron, a Lord or an army man. He was a friend and a very dear and already missed, surprising and easily ignored, ally in the struggle for justice everywhere.
Charlie Weinberg is Chair of Trustees at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and was Chief Executive Officer of Safe Ground until October 2022.
Read Lord Ramsbotham’s 2019 report on probation reform: People are not things.