There are few things sadder than a minister trying to defend a policy she doesn’t really believe in. This time last week no one, especially the education secretary, was talking about grammar schools. Then a photographer snapped a No 10 adviser with a briefing note on grammars and Justine Greening was forced to come to the Commons to answer an urgent question about them. “I know nothing about anything,” said Greening. “But when I do, I’ll let you know.”
Less than 24 hours later, the prime minister had launched her own Brexit distraction strategy: a backbench-pleasing return to the 1950s. And Greening was left to pick up the pieces in a Commons statement. “After consulting absolutely nobody, the government is proud to present its green paper, ‘Schools that Work for Everyone Apart from Those Who Fail the 11+’,” she began. “As the prime minister says …” And that was the last original word she said. The rest was a direct lift of Theresa May’s speech from the previous week. A government minister reduced to the role of a second-rate ventriloquist.
“Stop your silly class war,” said the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner. The Tory backbenchers couldn’t believe their luck and started braying and heckling. Labour making a crap gag while banging on about the class divide is their idea of a good time. Rayner let them dig their own grave before going on. “Er. This was actually the advice of your last prime minister, David Cameron, who believed that bringing back grammar schools was delusional,” she said. The same David Cameron who that afternoon had resigned as an MP because he couldn’t face the idea of being lobby fodder for bad policy. A few Tories had the grace to look a bit sheepish.
Rayner went on to ask why the government planned to introduce grammar schools when Nicky Morgan, Greening’s predecessor, Neil Carmichael, the Conservative chair of the education select committee, and all the experts thought it was a complete non-starter. It’s customary for a minister to at least go through the motions of jotting down a few notes when her opposite number is speaking, but Greening just stared blankly at her feet. Why bother to write down some questions when you know you’ve got no intention of answering them?
Instead, Greening decided to go completely off topic. “Under our proposals every school in the country can be grammar schools,” she said, unwittingly signalling that she had failed to understand the nature of selection. As if hell-bent on failing her own 11+, she then went on to say that allowing faith schools to choose 100% of its intake on the basis of faith would be a brilliant way of increasing diversity and religious tolerance.
This was too much even for the Tories, and backbencher after backbencher stood up to enquire whether she really knew what she was doing. Ken Clarke, Nicky Morgan, Neil Carmichael, Anna Soubry, Theresa Villiers: all more in sorrow than in anger. It was all the more devastating for Greening for being done terribly politely. Like trying to explain to a nice but dim child that, despite having tried terribly hard, their homework was yet again completely wrong.
Even Michael Gove got in on the act. The former education secretary is fed up with being placed in purdah and is now shameless about doing anything to get back in favour with Theresa May. “May I congratulate the minister on her clear moral purpose,” he began obsequiously. How a man with so little moral purpose can detect it in another is one of parliament’s mysteries. The toadying over, Gove broke his own Brexit diktat by suggesting Greening consult a few experts before ending by talking about the benefits of selection at the age of 16. Something that the education secretary had not previously mentioned.
“It’s not clear to me,” said Greening. Bizarrely, this observation was her only moment of clarity in the whole session. Why was she here? Why had she ever allowed herself to be talked into doing the prime minister’s dirty work. This was Theresa’s fight, not hers. She did what all Theresa’s ministers have so far done under pressure. She started making up policy as she went along.
There wouldn’t just be an 11+. There would be a 12+, a 13+, a 14+, a 15+ and a 16+; schoolchildren could go to grammar schools whenever they felt ready. They might even want to just drop into a grammar school for a couple of subjects and go to a secondary modern for the rest. Everything was going to be great, great, great. Back at No 10, May groaned. Yet another minister was in desperate need of re-education.
