Gillian Keegan has completed a breathtaking hat-trick of abuse

The education secretary spent PMQs muttering yet more insults – perfect preparation for her next TV interview, writes Tom Peck

Here she was, mouthing the words ‘stupid man’ in Keir Starmer’s direction (AP)

I couldn’t possibly remember all the times over the last 13 years that the government has dropped some bad news 10 minutes before the start of Prime Minister’s Questions. They think it’s a clever ruse, because it doesn’t give the opposition time to do any preparation on it.

But it doesn’t always work. Prime Minister’s Questions is the only bit of House of Commons action anyone vaguely normal might watch. And this week, the “first week back” for MPs (but not thousands of schoolchildren), it could hardly have backfired more.

Because who, really, is going to listen to a word that comes out of the prime minister’s mouth if scrolling away next to him in split screen is the full 150-strong list he’s just published of the country’s most dangerous schools? That’s quite an attention-stealer, isn’t it? People of a certain age might remember the blind panic of trying to read the cheat codes hidden in the end credits of early Nineties video games show Bad Influence as they scrolled along the bottom of the screen at the speed of light.

Those same people are of a different age now, and it’s a curious deja vu – watching Sky News like it’s the digital rain from The Matrix, except the things you’re trying to read now is whether the kids you’ve dropped off for their first day back at school are at risk of having the roof collapse on top of them.

Those in the chamber itself, were treated to an even less edifying spectacle. While Keir Starmer went through his list own list of schools, specifically ones that were on Labour’s list to be rebuilt before it was scrapped in 2010, pantomime clown of the moment Gillian Keegan completed a breathtaking hat trick of vituperation.

You’d think the people in charge of schools might consider the fact they’ve had to close around 150 of them to be a moment for a little contrition. Instead, it was right into her third straight day of abuse. On Monday she wanted to know why she hadn’t been thanked for doing a f****** good job. On Tuesday she told headteachers to “get off their backsides” and fill in the form she’d sent them, just on the off chance the most recent national schools crisis hadn’t rendered them rather busy already.

And this time, here she was, mouthing the words “stupid man” in Keir Starmer’s direction. Starmer, it hardly needs to be said, entered politics at the age of 52 after a long career that culminated in his becoming the country’s chief prosecutor. “Stupid man” doesn’t really cut it, but then, self-evidently, neither does Gillian Keegan.

As metaphors go, shouting about crumbly concrete failures in the already crumbling House of Commons is just too on the nose. Barely a few weeks ago, a Freedom of Information request sent to House of Commons authorities confirmed there have been seven incidents of “falling masonry” in the Palace of Westminster since 2021. This doesn’t include the incident in 2017 which I happened to miss by about 70 lucky seconds, when a large piece of Unesco World Heritage site went straight through a car windscreen.

There is a prevailing mood in Westminster that if they ignore the dilapidation quite literally all around them it will either go away, or become somebody else’s fault. It is, possibly, just about, maybe possible to feel sorry for Keegan. When you rattle through five education secretaries in a year, one of them lasting for less than a single day, that the music should stop on you is just bad luck. The rest of it, though, is bad grace.

One of the “dangerous” schools, as it happens, is my old school. This morning, my Instagram feed lit up with pictures of beaming 11-year-old children standing on front doorsteps, off to that same school, for their very first day. It took me a while to work out why their big brothers weren’t standing next to them, but it turns out they’re not going back until at least next week because the classrooms they were in six weeks ago have now been declared a risk to life.

The education these kids have lost out on is too depressing to think about for too long. Covid, teachers strikes, and now structurally unsafe buildings.

Gillian Keegan sat there muttering abuse to herself, perhaps practising for her next turn in front of the TV cameras. Starmer and Sunak pointed fingers at one another. It hardly needs to be stated that you can’t prop up a roof with a pointed finger. All Sunak could say to Starmer’s list of cancelled school refurbishments was that it had, in some way that nobody could possibly understand, been the wrong type of list. That it was somehow “ideological”.

He said that when Starmer set out his “mission” for education earlier this year, he hadn’t breathed a word about crumbly concrete. This turned out not to be true, and the speaker allowed Labour’s Lucy Powell to correct the record.

There is no real way out of this sort of terrible mess for a government on whom the country has already turned its back. The best it can hope for is that Sunak might rediscover a bit of his 2020 charm, the bright young thing who people looked at and felt to be authentically on their side. Paying people’s wages is just as big a deal as making their children safe at school.

But all he appears to have is radio silence, and all that’s being done in his name is the education secretary shouting and swearing and blaming everybody else. They probably know they’ve already been condemned.