COMING back from his two-day holiday in the south of France to calls for his resignation bursting about his head, Home Secretary and Blackburn MP Jack Straw remains defiant.

But he ought to be chastened too.

For while it was not his or his department's fault that people who gave information in confidence to police investigating the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence had their names published in the report of the Macpherson inquiry into his death, he has followed one error with another.

He is quite right to be dismissive of the overblown demands for him to go that are coming from the Opposition and the Tory press given a bone to worry.

But even though it maybe the case that he and the now-baying Tories agreed to Mr Straw's deputy, Paul Boateng, making a Commons statement statement on Friday about this bungle - enabling Mr Straw to go on this trip - it does not follow that, amid such a serious furore, it was wise for him to leave the country.

Politicians, he said, have to balance their work with their families and perhaps more than others because they see them less.

Maybe so. But, in this case, it may seem to many like Mr Straw put his family holiday before his concern for the people endangered by this dreadful botch-up - and is not sorry that he did.

He should have stayed and faced the storm in the Commons himself, and, surely, Labour's spin doctors could have won him positive points by making it known he had forsaken a holiday to do so.

When he did not stay, he should have been gracious enough to admit he was wrong - the rare instance of a politician admitting to error would have also have ultimately worked to his benefit.

Mr Straw is right not to resign. After all, he has not sinned.

But he has blundered naM- vely.

And if he will not realise this publicly, he ought to privately - for his own sake.

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