Ministers will have winced when it was revealed on Wednesday that another prisoner has been mistakenly released from a London prison in just the last week.

A 24-year-old Algerian, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, was released from Wandsworth last Wednesday, even though he was still meant to be serving time for overstaying his visa.

Deputy prime minister David Lammy has since said he was “absolutely outraged and appalled” by the news, and insisted his “officials have been workign through the night to take him back to prison.

But this news was particularly humiliating for the government because of the way the public found out about the error, how deputy prime minister David Lammy handled it and what happened else just at the end of October.

1. The timing could not be much worse

As if the accident

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