My Mr and I waste a lot of argument capital circling around the probable consequences of politicians’ misdemeanours. He thinks we’re in last-days-of-Rome territory, and all it will take is a revelation that Grant Shapps yelled at a waiter and the whole thing will come down like a Jenga tower. I, conversely, think the last days of Rome went on for a long time and, in a post-Johnson world, the bar is so low for probity and whatnot that a minister would have to commit murder for the consequences to even ricochet into the next week.
So I don’t think Suella Braverman has torched her own career if she did ask Whitehall officials to fix it for her to do a speed awareness course in private (although she says she did “nothing untoward”). But in the fanciful event that Mr Z is right and I am wrong, that Braverman’s trivial but telling act dispatches her to the wilderness of her party, it will have been the dumbest imaginable thing to lose a portfolio over. She could have done that course in a room full of people and nobody would have recognised her – not because she hasn’t made quite the name for herself with the frothing Nazi-lite crowdpleasers, but because the speed awareness course is a place of such pure alienation that nobody notices anyone.
I’m convinced that everyone with a driving licence has done one but nobody admits it because of the shame, though not of the speeding itself, which people find pretty easy to forgive themselves for. I have only ever met one person with active penitence for going too fast, and her too fast was 90mph down Kings Road in London. For anyone unfamiliar with the Al Stewart song, this is a shopping street dense with milling people. Even then, this driver’s take-home was not “abide by the speed limit”, it was “never have an argument with your boyfriend after five margaritas, and then get in a car”.
No, the course itself is crucifyingly shameful. It starts with a lecture about not looking at your phone, where you’re carefully walked through the consequences of disobeying: your course will be annulled and you’ll have to pay for another. This cycle – look at phone, get course voided, take another, look at phone – is potentially infinite. This explanation takes so long, and mentions the word “phone” so often, that all you want to do is get your phone out and play Stick Hero. Your phone becomes so magnetic that it feels like it’s glowing and yet you can’t touch it, an experience of impotence and submission that reorientates your sense of self from “person” to “worm”. It’s a lot like how I imagine a communist re-education camp.
Now 19 hours have passed, but in reality, only 19 minutes. There is the whole rest of the day to fill and all the instructors have got to say is: “Don’t go so fast. Slow down.” They solicit questions, but no one has any. “Nothing? Nobody wants to know anything?” the instructors plead, and even though all they are to you is a suit, standing between you and your phone, you do still feel for them on a human level. One woman on my course felt the awkwardness so keenly that she fished up, “What about skating on the 10%? Going 77 in a 70 – doesn’t everyone do that?” “No,” the gentleman said, stern but also palpably grateful.
They do have one interesting thing to say, which they save until the end of the day – and that is that however much you break the speed limit, you don’t actually arrive much sooner. You could break the law 17 times on a 100-mile journey and still only shave four minutes off it.
Braverman, in other words, could camouflage effortlessly in this swamp of boredom and authoritarianism. She should have saved her sketchy use of civil servants for something more fun, like Wimbledon tickets.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
