As you might be dimly aware, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, had quite a bad day yesterday. Having conducted an interview with ITV News on the crumbling concrete crisis that has forced school closures at the 11th hour before the start of term, Keegan was still miked up when she inquired, apparently rhetorically: “Does anyone ever say: ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’? No signs of that, no?” No. Nope. Not seeing any signs of that, I’m afraid. In fact, the mere fact of this interview has obliterated the possibility of signs-of-that emerging. It was signs-ocidal.
Fans of turbo-cringe TV will have enjoyed Gillian later being forced, Clockwork Orange-style, to watch this clip of herself live on Sky News. Her reactions were shown in split-screen; when it got to the bad bit, Keegan actually let out a laugh. Some people have chosen to categorise this as typical-heartless-Tory-not-giving-a-toss, but it was surely the involuntary nervous reaction of someone being made to watch the most embarrassing moment of her day – and indeed her decade – on live TV. As the laugh escaped her lips, I imagined her spad silently gnawing through his entire fist in the green room. Like the recent Black Mirror episode Joan Is Awful, the spectacle of Gillian Is Awful was grimly brilliant and brilliantly grim.
Inevitably, the show to which Gillian’s day was most compared was The Thick of It, which despite first airing in 2005 has ended up satirising its future as much as its present. Parallels were drawn between Keegan and The Thick of It’s bungling secretary of state Nicola Murray. Certainly, you might have detected some of the latter’s category-five haplessness in the part of the fateful ITV interview that Keegan actually knew would be aired, when she found herself trying to mitigate the situation by uttering the words: “A school can collapse for many reasons.” Guys, can you please get this into some sort of perspective – there are loads of things that could make a school cave in on your children’s heads. You’re being very small-minded obsessing about this one.
Many will be very long past the point of sympathy with the absolute shower in government, but it should be said that unlike half the people in the cabinet, Keegan isn’t a product of Oxford’s PPE degree and has actually had a job outside politics, having worked her way up to senior business roles from apprenticing aged 16 in a Merseyside car factory. Perhaps, like Murray, she is less easy to loathe than other cabinet inadequates. We don’t hate Nicola Murray. We get that she’s not up to it, and we get that that really matters, but we can kind of see how whatever mess she’s in happened. And we can kind of see how her and her team’s ideas for getting her out of it seem like they might work, until they don’t, and make it all so much worse. The special sauce is the remorseless logic of it all – the sense that despite the illusion of being the big important minister, making the big important choices, you are fated by your own shortcomings in a wholly dysfunctional system. As Nicola observes as the disintegration gathers pace: “We are a dying government. Our hair’s falling out and we’re coughing up blood and our kids are asking us to change the will.”
This is the comic/tragicomic/tragic doom-loop in which Rishi Sunak’s administration is now inescapably stuck, except with real schools and real children’s heads. The Sunak government neither makes the political weather nor seems able to predict it. Everything it does – and everything it and its predecessors neglected to do – now constitutes some sort of fuck-up extended universe. Worse still, crossover events have started happening. The crisis franchises are bleeding into one another. Keegan was holidaying in Spain as the crumbling concrete situation reached decision point last week, but was unable to get back in good time to deal with it because of the air traffic control chaos.
Every week, in some form or another, the Sunak government has to endure the mildly out-of-body experience of watching itself do clean-up on messes of its own making. Though these failures can be grotesque and iniquitous, there is a kind of absurdism to them. The mood can be crystallised in a seemingly endless variety of single sentences. Here’s one. Having recently defended Lee Anderson for telling migrants to “fuck off back to France”, the prime minister had little choice but to defend Gillian Keegan for demanding to know why people weren’t saluting her for “doing a fucking good job”, even though she was explaining that schools could literally fall down.
Put like that, even Sunak must be on the point of seeing that this is all galaxies beyond something that can be fixed by late nights at the desk in the cashmere hoodie. Unfortunately, Rishi’s belief that you can work hard and be a details man and that somehow that’s enough is all he’s got. An official who works with the prime minster reportedly told Dominic Cummings recently: “He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job.”
Hard to argue with that. Sunak is a supply PM, brought in after another implosion, when he became the fifth Conservative prime minister inside six and a half years. This mad merry-go-round is part of the system rot. Gillian Keegan is education secretary – a role that has been held by 10 different people since the Conservatives assumed power in 2010. It’s been held by five different people since July last year alone. What does the Conservative party expect? What do people honestly think the outcomes will be, with those inputs? Perhaps the other nine education secretaries are the owners of the arses to which Gillian Keegan was referring; perhaps it was the media; perhaps it was other nameless countries who are doing worse. Perhaps the Conservatives have simply reached the we-need-different-voters stage of the grief process. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the system is totally dysfunctional, and that there is absolutely no compelling plan for how to fix it, much less deliver the radical overhaul it needs, from either of the main parties. Unless he gets one, we’ll be back here or somewhere similar under a Keir Starmer government – maybe that’s why the leader of the opposition only ever speaks like he’s managing your expectations.
As for the current government, however much activity we see from them now, it all just feels like light from a dead star. Maybe Rishi Sunak really does believe he can turn things around. But there can’t be too many more days like Monday before he realises that this is a movie in which he has been dead all along.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber Publishing, £9.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
