If Boris Johnson knows no shame, how can we embarrass him into action?

Theresa May and her government were bothered that the people didn’t like them. With the current incumbent in No 10, I’m not sure that’s true anymore

“You know, they realise that people don’t like them. It bothers them.” So said a lobbyist in the field of disability to me of Theresa May’s government.

Of course, that didn’t mean that May’s administration was ever going to be willing to grub up the really nasty weeds that were throttling Britain’s disabled people – the “personal independence payments” or ESA assessments carried out by private companies that have sown misery, for example. But it was a government that could be poked. It could be embarrassed into thinking about these issues – sometimes even moving its position on them in the process.

With Boris Johnson in No 10, I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

People hating on refugees or Europeans, those who cry about how tough wealthy upper-middle-class folks have it – they’ll get a hearing from the current lot. Ditto those who think children should sit in rows and be caned for speaking in class. The “hang ‘em, flog ‘em, throw away the key” brigade? Come and have tea with the minister! But if you’re concerned about how Britain treats its poor, its sick, its disabled, citizens? Forget about it.

Last week I was approached by a PR person who works for a lot of disability-related causes. They wanted to share with me a report highlighting the dismal performance of some schools in granting equal access for disabled pupils. The report, from Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning (Drill), was hard-hitting and timely. As well as ideas for schools and local authorities, it contained recommendations for the Department for Education. On that basis, you’d hope it might have received some attention from the government. We heard nothing.

It’s timely because, as an aside, I had another subject in contention for this column: the regularity with which airlines manage to lose their passengers’ wheelchairs – even those who have paid for the “superior” service of travelling in business class.

There’s an interesting comparison here. While airlines and airports aren’t the most progressive of organisations – sometimes it seems as if you’d need a herd of elephants to move them, hopefully with an angry bull tusker in tow – they are run by corporate entities who tend to pay at least some regard to their good names. Put enough pressure on them, and it’s possible to get them to change their policies or behaviour.

Is the same true of Boris Johnson and his not so merry men and women? I have my doubts.

The problem with handing the electorate handing this government five years and an unassailable majority is that it is responding with a resounding “yah boo sucks” to me, to you, to the researchers behind the excellent Drill report into fair access to education for disabled children – and to anyone else highlighting the growing social problems festering in the underbelly of modern Britain.

A quasi Spectre has taken control while James Bond is off gallivanting somewhere warm; it’s going to take a lot more than a snappy one liner and a Walther PPK to move it now it’s dug in.

Now I’m sure I’ll still get calls from snotty government press officers demanding that I use their glib statements at the end of this piece, or refer to their creatively massaged statistics when I point out how mean their departments are being. No government likes to be criticised. But the difference now is that criticism probably isn’t going to change anything.

So why am I bothering to highlight Drill’s report a full week after its publication? Because I don’t want to succumb to defeatism, and make the lives of Boris Johnson and his spin doctors easier by just assuming that throwing this well-evidenced brick won’t do any good. Even if reports like this, and the columns I write about them, are akin to shouting into the ether, that shouting still needs to be done. That’s why the report was written; and it’s why I will still write about it.

This government needs its many flaws and the problems it is wilfully ignoring pointing out precisely because it is so powerful. Of course, that ought to be the job of the opposition. A halfway decent one would have the capacity to fire up reports like this latest study from Drill.

Trouble is, a significant part of the Labour Party seems to determine to repeat the mistakes it made last time around. There mightn’t be much help to come from that quarter until the party rediscovers its appetite for winning.