“I need to be a little careful,” confided Jonathan Gullis before a fringe. “I got told off by the secretary of state last night.”
Awkward pause. “Oh… dear…” said the chair.
“Don’t worry,” he grinned back happily. “A lot of people tell me off all the time!”
Honestly, it’s hard not to respond to his enthusiasm. Seeing him around the conference over the three days (“I did 11 fringes! Michael Gove did nine and I did 11! Mention that to people!”), he grew to remind me of Colin Creevey from Harry Potter, the young boy who was just overly excited to be at the school and at everything that happened. Or for older readers, the “Brilliant!” kid from The Fast Show. What government was doing on pay was brilliant! Teachers were brilliant! Government had a childcare plan and that was brilliant, but actually whoops he couldn’t talk about it because it wasn’t his brief and actually it might well be a secret, please don’t tell anyone or the secretary of state will tell him off again.
And the boundless capering enthusiasm of the new schools minister made a neat contrast from the internecine warfare of his cabinet elders and betters. To summarise, in case you got lost: Suella dislikes Michael. Kemi dislikes Suella. Nadine dislikes Suella too. Penny dislikes Liz. Priti dislikes Liz. In fact, everyone seems to dislike Liz apart from Kwasi. Kwasi just dislikes anyone who shorted the pound, except if they gave him champagne at a private party while doing it.
Meanwhile, playing the role of icy elder sister to offset Gullis’ japery, Andrea Jenkyns seemed to be mistaking her new list of ministerial responsibilities as a checklist of sectors to offend. Local devolved authorities, who shouldn’t be given skills funding. Tick. Universities, who shouldn’t have international students. Tick. Universities, who feed their students “a diet of critical race theory, anti-British history and social Marxism”. Tick.
Andrea Jenkyns seemed to have a checklist of sectors to offend
Forgive me a brief digression: that last sentence is in fact a direct and verbatim quote. I feel the need to clarify because I don’t want people thinking that a light-hearted piece is just making up wildly implausible things for a minister of the crown to say. But then she said it to the Bruges Group, a group whose entire purpose seems satirical, so who can really tell?
The new education secretary, wisely, stayed away from the fringe. In his brief appearance on the main stage, facing an audience whipped into such a frenzy by the previous speaker, Thérèse Coffey, that cameras spotted not one but three people fast asleep, he promised constant attention and pressure on the school system, which went down well with the crowd and about as well as you’d expect with people in the sector called afterwards for comment.
In my now dangerously extended metaphor, he’s clearly cast himself as Serious Dad. Just look at that photo of him and his team on stage. You can almost hear his internal monologue: “Right, remember what we discussed. Happy faces, happy smiles. Just pack it in for a bit and we’ll get McDonalds on the way home.”
And dotted around the rest of the education fringes we were blessed with some gallows humour. David Johnston MP reminded us that he used to run a social mobility charity and wondered out loud if he could go back to doing that as it was a lot more fun than being an MP. Lord Vaizey outlined his priorities if he were to be education secretary for a day and then observed that this was about the average tenure at the moment.
And then it was Tuesday night. With the train strikes forecast to cause chaos on the Wednesday, the hordes departed and that was about it.
Sorry, what’s that? Were there any actual policy announcements from this whole new team, you ask? Yeah, hundreds. There’s a long-term plan. All going very well. Keeping focused on the difficult decisions, except when they U-turn.
Nothing has changed. Keep on going, teachers. All good.
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