Foreign secretaries come and go, but there was only one Nick Gibb

The former minister for school standards was fired in the recent cabinet reshuffle, but he has a legacy that most politicians could only dream of, writes Ed Dorrell

‘Nick Gibb was the rarest of rare things: he had a genuinely transformative career’ (Getty)

In all the noise and drama of the cabinet reshuffle, many people will have missed the most important manoeuvre made by Downing Street: the firing of a junior minister you’ve probably not heard of.

For all the machinations about who was in and who was out, the decision to end the government career of Nick Gibb, minister of state for school standards, brought to a close one of the great frontbench tenures of our time.

Gibb, who was first appointed to the shadow education team in 2005, has served as shadow schools minister or actual schools minister for almost all of the decade-and-a-half since (apart from a couple of years during the coalition when he was fired from, and then reappointed to, the same role).