No one can accuse Boris Johnson of not seeing the big picture. After a summer of U-turns – helpfully described by the prime minister as merely strategic tacking into the head of a gale; thank heavens there was a purpose to months of chaos after all – Boris chose to mark parliament’s return by announcing that he was joining LinkedIn. Though with his own CV carefully doctored to omit most of his own career embarrassments. But what some ministers will be really watching for is whether they get an email from Boris to link in with him.
Not least Gavin Williamson. Private Pike’s summer from hell has been pure, unrequited joy for most of his cabinet colleagues as it has meant the spotlight has been off them. Their departments have been left to trundle on uninterrupted regardless of any number of minor cock-ups. Matt Hancock looks positively refreshed: though his lucky pink tie still looks as if it is only held together by the stains, he is almost back to his Tiggerish self.
Everything is once again for the best in the best of all possible worlds for Matt. Before the summer recess, Hancock looked close to breaking point. Brittle, snappy and unsure of himself. Now he is a man reborn.
Called to answer what could have been an awkward urgent question on the government’s ongoing mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, Matt just breezed his way through. He by and large ignored questions about why his department had chosen to dismantle Public Health England in the middle of a pandemic and headed up the new body with Dido Harding, a woman whose CV bears even less scrutiny than the prime minister’s.
Most startlingly of all he repeatedly claimed that Typhoid Dido’s track-and-trace system was meeting all its targets – it has consistently missed them for the past nine weeks – and praised the government’s response as world beating. “We are in the top tranche internationally,” he boasted. As in the top tranche both for mortality rates and for those countries who don’t actually have a mass testing system against which we can compare ourselves. He even seemed quite thrilled by the prospect of France and Spain having a second wave. He was sick and tired of them getting so many good headlines early in the pandemic.
It was probably just as well Boris had chosen to end recess early. Another week and Matt could have been on the same wavelength as former Australian prime minister – and possibly soon to be joint trade president for the UK – Tony Abbott, who had interrupted his usual round of abuse that morning to use a speech to say that maybe the coronavirus had done the world a favour. People should be just chilling a bit. All that had happened was that some of the weak and vulnerable had been culled by natural selection. Nice.
Gavin didn’t have things nearly so easy as he was forced to come to the Commons to explain the Department of Education’s dismal performance over the summer. On the plus side, it was too early to say just how many schools had managed to return with a full head count of pupils, so he was able to act as if everything had passed off relatively smoothly. Which it probably had, when put up against every other clusterfuck.
If Private Pike had been spending the morning brushing up his own LinkedIn profile – who could forget that glory, glory night in 2007 at the St Albans Travelodge when he had won ‘Fireplace Salesman of the Year’ for the second time? – then it’s a fair bet there would also have been a fair bit of revisionism to match Boris’s. Out would have gone being sacked for leaking details of a National Security Council meeting, along with every departmental cock-up since March this year. It’s a long list.
So much so, that the most striking feature of Gav’s Commons statement was its amnesia. He had forgotten that it had been him who had ordered Ofqual to devise an exam algorithm that prioritised minimising grade inflation over and above the impact on less well-off students from traditionally poor-performing schools.
Ofqual had been to blame, he declared, and he had taken “immediate” action to rectify the situation once it had been brought to his attention. Immediate, as in saying students should stop moaning for the best part of a week so that many missed out on their first choice universities. And he also wanted to pay tribute to Sally Collier, the outgoing chief executive of Ofqual, who had done the decent thing and agreed to be sacked after it had been made clear to her that no one at the DfE was going to take responsibility for Gav’s mistakes.
Labour’s shadow education secretary, Kate Green, merely read through the charge sheet yet again. Somehow it becomes more damning on every retelling. She did stop short of demanding Gav’s resignation though. Mainly because there is no point. In any normal world Williamson would have gone long ago, but we are way through that looking glass. Gavin gets to stay merely because Boris needs someone to sack in case anything else goes wrong in the next few months.
Sack him now and there’s no one but Boris left to take the hit. So Private Pike is the classic useful idiot. Another asset to add to his LinkedIn CV. Which reminded him. There was still no invitation to share his profile with the prime minister.
