A lot of people have a liking for alternative histories. The Big What If. You know the kind of thing, “What if the Nazis had won World War Two?”, “What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?”, “Would things have been different if I hadn’t gone for a drink with those two Russian sailors back in 1993?”.

There’s always been a nagging feeling among both the friends and enemies of David Blunkett that his two resignations from public office were forced by technicalities. Tony Blair said that Blunkett left office still a “decent and honourable man”. There were those of us taking the opposite view who, while glad to see a man of such overweening arrogance, disdain and authoritarianism brought low, felt that it was the minor sins that had delivered the killer blow when the major ones stacked high out the back had been overlooked.

Hark then, as both closure and nemesis were dished up for both sides yesterday in the unlikely form of Lord Ramsbotham, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons from 1995 to 2001. Speaking on Radio 4’s PM programme, he said of his experience of the foreign prisoner issue:

I drew it to the Government’s attention very specifically in an annual report…. It was my last report which I published in 2001 so it went to David Blunkett… I was very specific - two paragraphs… The first paragraph, I headed it ‘Foreign Nationals: ‘The number of foreign nationals in prison has been increasing steadily over the years and is now reaching such proportions that I have called frequently for the prison service to appoint someone responsible for overseeing them as a group and for meeting the needs that they bring to every prison in which they are confined.‘…

The second paragraph I’ll quote from. I said: ‘I have had a number of meetings with foreign national groups in prisons and referred the points that they have made both to the prison and the immigration services for resolution. It would seem sense to complete deportation bureacracy while deportees are in prison so that they are taken straight from prison to the airport rather than transfer them to an immigration centre or another prison for processing thus increasing delay and adding to costs.’

As David says himself of the Home Office’s blunder: “My view is that heads should roll”

And there we have it. What if David Blunkett hadn’t had to resign as Home Secretary? In our alternative history, Blunkett dodges the technicalities of his lover’s nanny’s visa, “forgotten” emails and breaches of the ministerial code, and stays on as Home Secretary until Lord Ramsbotham shanks him on the PM programme on April 26 2006. Blunkett knew about the problems with foreign nationals five years ago but still allowed 1,023 foreign prisoners to waltz off. As coincidence would have it, Blunkett’s mind was elsewhere in 2001, precoccupied, as it was, with Kimberley Quinn who Blunkett met in the August. “BONKER BLUNKETT’S BLUNDER”, screams the Sun and immediately offers him a lucrative column.

Blair gets to have his cake of Blunkett being an “decent and honourable man” while having to eat the fact that the Home Secretary was incompetent, unheeding and distracted while in charge of the Government’s largest department. The rest of us can luxuriate in the fact that Blunkett has been brought down by a big, old-fashioned cock-up for which he only has himself to blame and not by cheese-paring, hair-splitting and bull-shitting.

All is well once more.