“Personally, I don’t much like the stick, but it is amazing what can be achieved with a sharpened carrot,” Gavin Williamson, then the government chief whip, told the 2017 Tory conference. He was revelling in his reputation as a modern Machiavelli who might just emulate House of Cards’s Francis Urquhart by using the dark arts to manipulate his way from chief whip to the top job.
Williamson made himself indispensable to David Cameron, Theresa May when she was the “stop Boris” candidate and then, remarkably, to Boris Johnson, even though May had sacked him as defence secretary after a leaked inquiry (he denied being the leaker).
To intimidate Tory backbenchers, Williamson kept a pet tarantula on his desk called Cronus, after the Greek god who won power by castrating his father before eating his own children. The MPs described Williamson as a “man who liked to chop off heads”. Now some of the same backbenchers want to chop off his, after the shambles over A-level grades. The education secretary’s friends point out that he made enemies as chief whip. But that doesn’t explain his panicky, last-minute change of tack, after he had five months to prepare for results day. We have an education secretary who didn’t do his homework. It seems he reacted to the fiasco over A-level grades in Scotland, which forced a U-turn and the SNP government to rely on teachers’ grade assessments.
Perhaps Williamson should have remained in the dark. Chief whip was his natural habitat. He does not perform well in the spotlight but education, like health, requires a good front of house performer. Even before the A-level mess, Williamson was blamed by some in Downing Street for the government’s failure to deliver its pledge that all primary school pupils would return to their classrooms before their summer break. His future in his job probably now hangs on a successful return in just over two weeks.
Even that might not save him. Williamson is under pressure to follow Scotland’s lead and go back to relying on teachers’ assessments, as Labour now demands. Understandably, he wants to avoid grade inflation that would dilute the A-level’s “gold standard”. But at the very moment Johnson wanted to return to his “levelling up” agenda, Williamson managed to level down, leaving students from disadvantaged backgrounds the main victims of the computer-driven downgrades, even if they had the ability to outperform their schools’ record in recent years. That will hardly help Johnson retain the “blue wall” seats in the north he captured from Labour. Williamson’s system penalises schools which had improved. The winners are the private schools, not a good look for a “levelling up” government.
The appeals system, still to be devised, will have to work well for Williamson to salvage something from the wreckage. Allowing students to opt for their mock A-level results is no panacea; some teachers deliberately mark them hard, others soft. He would be wise to announce long-term reform so that offers of university places are based on actual results rather than predicted grades.
Johnson’s allies hoped this month would give the government a firebreak from coronavirus so they could return to the agenda on which he won his big majority last December. As one put it: “There was a feeling that this was the moment to get back on track, so that people could see we have a 10-year plan to reform the country.” The A-levels saga, and continuing anxiety over whether schools will reopen fully, shows that the pandemic continues to eclipse everything.
Williamson’s woes are symbolic of how Johnson’s government is being buffeted by events. Incompetence is a dangerous, sticky label which is very hard to throw off, as John Major discovered in the 1990s. After retreats on free school meals and contact tracing, tough quarantine measures have been added to Johnson’s list of U-turns. People arriving in the UK should have been told to self-isolate at the start of the outbreak. Now Johnson tries to atone by adopting a tough line on countries where infections are rising. In doing so, he harms the economy and makes life miserable for thousands of families whose holidays are disrupted.
Downing Street hoped that announcing good news on reopening beauty salons, bowling alleys and casinos two hours before adding France to the quarantine list, might sugar the pill. But it didn’t work; the bad news on France grabbed the headlines.
Confirmation the UK is in the deepest recession in its history, and that 730,000 fewer people are in employment than in March, are other reminders that coronavirus will prevent a return to anything approaching normal politics for a very long time. That is bad news for Johnson unless he and his ministers can display greater competence than they currently do.