Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a politician, brought up on an Essex Council estate.

He won a scholarship to a local boarding school, went to Leeds University and became president of the National Union of Students.

Nearly 20 years ago he entered Parliament as the MP for Blackburn and after long years in opposition he's now in government,

where it's clear that his attitude to his job is deeply informed by his personal experiences, a single parent for a mother, a friend's

suicide at school, a divorce, and most publicly his son's involvement with drugs.

These are the things which help him know where he stands. I want to

enable people to live their lives more securely, he says, with greater freedom.

He is the Home Secretary Jack Straw. You finally arrived then, Jack Straw, aged 50 out of the wilderness, to, you know,

whether wittingly or unwittingly, perhaps the job that you are always heading towards.

How has it changed your life? It's changed my lives in some ways

quite profoundly and in other ways not at all. Life's changed because I have to make

loads and loads of decisions and I think one of the things that's different

about being Home Secretary from most other ministerial jobs is that you have to make decisions

day by day week by week which affects people's liberty directly.

And you cover a huge range, a huge range, but you have to decide whether to let this person

out of prison, whether this person should be detained on the prevention of terrorism,

whether this person should be detained in an

immigration centre, this person's related in the country, that person excluded.

But do you feel a kind of calm about that having arrived that now you're actually doing something after 18 years of if you forgive me not

doing anything because that's the nature of opposition or is there a kind of angst of

...