Gillian Keegan swearing: Accident-prone training sec in comparison with hapless Thick Of It character – however is that truthful?

Credit the place it is due, Gillian Keegan is an efficient sport for approaching Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge to face the music over the crumbling faculties fiasco – and her four-letter outburst on TV earlier within the day.

The plucky training secretary may have been forgiven for muttering one other expletive as she squirmed whereas Sophy performed the clip of her declaring she’d carried out a “f****** good job” whereas others sat “on their arses”.

Her discomfort, not surprisingly, has been likened to an episode of the TV satire The Thick Of It, with the accident-prone Ms Keegan in contrast with the hapless Nicola Murray – a personality who lurched from one PR catastrophe to a different.

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All that was lacking was Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed Downing Street spin physician within the TV sequence, sitting watching her “f****** good job” interview in his workplace together with his head in his palms and shouting obscenities.

But is that truthful?

Supporters of Ms Keegan, who left college on Merseyside at 16 and have become an apprentice in a automobile manufacturing facility, will declare she’s a breath of contemporary air in an in any other case stuffy Tory cupboard stuffed with Oxbridge graduates who’ve by no means had a correct job.

On the opposite hand, the training secretary might be accused of ignoring Denis Healey’s first regulation of politics: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

But the intense level concerning the school concrete crisis is it makes the federal government look incompetent and has ruined any hopes Rishi Sunak may need had of getting the brand new political 12 months and day one of many new time period at Westminster off to an excellent begin.

Faced with predictable outrage from opposition MPs – and considerations raised by various Conservative MPs – throughout a Commons assertion lasting an hour and 20 minutes, the fearless Ms Keegan as soon as once more got here out preventing in opposition to her critics.

The key fees in opposition to her had been that she ought to have acted earlier to take care of the crumbling faculties, she’s didn’t preserve dad and mom knowledgeable about whether or not their kids’s faculties are open or closed, and that Tory spending cuts are in charge.

One of essentially the most damaging assaults on the federal government got here not from a political appointment however from a retired Whitehall mandarin, Jonathan Slater, who was everlasting secretary on the Department for Education from 2016 to 2020.

He claimed in an interview earlier that spending on college repairs was halved by Mr Sunak when he was chancellor – a claim fiercely denied by the PM – and there now was a “critical risk to life” in some faculties.

‘What an utter shambles’

Now to be truthful, Mr Slater was abruptly dismissed over one other fiasco on the training division – the examination grades debacle presided over by then training secretary Gavin Williamson in the course of the COVID pandemic.

So he is maybe not unbiased and presumably has an axe to grind.

His claims weren’t surprisingly seized upon and repeated within the Commons by the shadow training secretary Bridget Phillipson, who declared: “What an utter shambles!”

It does certainly seem like a shambles, although it is most likely unfair to heap all of the blame on the unlucky Ms Keegan.

Read extra:
Key problems in Rishi Sunak’s in-tray
All the schools affected by concrete crisis

After all, the Tories have had 10 – sure, 10 – training secretaries for the reason that Conservatives got here to energy – albeit in coalition – in 2010.

Those names in full: Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan, Justin Greening, Damian Hinds, Gavin Williamson, Nadhim Zahawi, Michelle Donelan, James Cleverly, Kit Malthouse and now the unlucky Ms Keegan.

But whereas she will not be solely in charge and has been plucky and an excellent sport in going through the music, her potty-mouthed try and blame others for the fiasco has made a foul scenario worse.