iven everything, it is probably just as well for Gavin Williamson’s career that he chose to let the students go home for Christmas. The beleaguered education secretary has thus managed to transform himself from the “invisible man” into Santa. Whatever else, he will not this Christmas be faced with trying to suppress Colditz-style escapes from student halls of residence. In the House of Commons it was all Williamson could do to prevent himself from breaking into a cover version of Chris Rea’s jolly 1986 hit, “Driving Home for Christmas”. Yo ho Ho!
But where will Gavin’s political base be, come Christmastide?
Ominously for Williamson and the many other underperforming ministers sitting around the cabinet table there will probably be a reshuffle after the party conference. Apparently, “competence and control” will be the criteria the prime minister will apply to his colleagues’s track record (to which they might respond that he might try judging himself and his chief adviser in the same way). In Williamson’s case the fiasco over exam results and the rather chaotic return of university students do not obviously suggest an abundance of competence and control in the department of education, though some senior officials have left the department and the exam quango, arguable scapegoats.
