I usually have a strong stomach and a sunny, cross-that-bridge attitude when it comes to rumours, but I have just read one that chilled me to the bone: there is a reason Gavin Williamson will not resign, and it is not because he, or anybody else, thinks he is doing a good job under difficult circumstances. The education secretary needs to stay in post until September so that, when all the promises are broken and English schools don’t, in fact, fully reopen, there can be someone other than the prime minister who can take the blame.
It is so chillingly believable. You just have to look at the government’s record – the more it promises something, the less likely it is to happen. It has made this firm commitment to schoolchildren often enough as to reduce its probability to zero. Nicola Sturgeon has already delivered for Scottish kids, and it is well known that the Westminster administration takes anything that happens in Scotland as a challenge to flex its inferiority. Between now and the start of September, it will emerge that some management consultant or other has already been paid 50 grand an hour to build a narrative in which school never mattered that much anyway. What we will really want at that point is Williamson to perform some medieval act of atonement, involving stocks, or ash, or thorns. In the absence of that, his resignation will finally be proffered and it will be of no comfort whatsoever, merely a moment’s tiny relief from the bitterness of watching him remain in post.
Sorry, I am being pessimistic, perhaps unduly. It is just that school is so important, and I say that as someone who does not even care that much about the work. It is everything else the kids have missed that bothers me.
To recap, I have an 11-year-old and two 12-year-olds, so, consequently, have nothing like as much cause for complaint as, say, someone with kids aged six, five and two. Plus only my youngest was in an exam year, and that was only SATs, so we have had none of the anguish that beset so many thousands of families, but I am damn complaining anyway.
They have spent six months without any good reason to get up in the morning. We are now almost in different time zones – breakfast is at what used to be lunchtime, and a flurry of rustling and foraging suddenly starts up at 11pm. It is like living with hedgehogs. Since time is experienced as a proportion of your life, this is now their reality: it is almost as far back as they can remember. They have lost all conception of a normal amount of moving about. It is entirely my fault, because so have I.
I just posted a card to a house that I could see from the postbox. They have missed all wholesome human company, except what they can find on Fortnite, and consequently have an entirely refashioned notion of what an interesting conversation is. They have missed canteen food, which they go on about all the time, and if somebody could explain to me what makes school sausages so much better than my sausages, I would be very grateful. They have all forgotten how to tie a tie. They have missed the last day of term, and the youngest missed the last day of primary school; they have missed the days running up to it, where all you do is watch films and ask each other out without meaning it, or maybe not even knowing what it means. They have missed the rhythm of the week, and preferring Thursdays to Tuesdays, or being able to tell the two apart. They have missed untold excursions, and who knows how many opportunities to be sick on a coach.
If schools do not reopen, or they open and then instantly close again, it won’t just be more of the same milestones, missed twice: they will also lose all sense of adulthood as a site of responsibility, where people mean what they say, and think things through, and make stuff happen. If they had been watching the news, of course, these notions would already be long gone, but current affairs have enjoyed quite low salience since one of the older two observed that it all boiled down to: “Why are we worse at everything than everyone, except Sweden?”
The worst of it is, put on the spot, they claim not to miss any of it and to be quite enjoying themselves. They have tasted life without variety, society, discovery or chips after school under a railway bridge, and decided that it is actually fine. I can only assume this will be followed by a crushing sense of futility, which I really would have preferred them to have much later, when they were at least old enough to drink.
In other words, the resignation of Williamson, if he snarls up again in September, will be nothing like enough. A two-for-one, with Dominic Cummings gone, too, would be insufficient. The collapse of the entire government, a snap election, a landslide Labour government – well, I would take it, but I would still be grumbling about this lost year of childhood. If this rumour is the strategy, it won’t work: the education minister may as well go now.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
