Gillian ‘hot mic’ Keegan’s F*** and an A*** will grade her for life

The education secretary is facing many awkward questions about the government’s handling of the school building crisis. But, writes Tom Peck, the only one she wants to be asked is why no one has thanked her for her hard work

Far from being a ‘hot mic’ incident, Keegan’s is a ‘hot interview’, in which the interviewee somehow forgets they are standing in front of a television camera, giving a television interview, and talking to the news reporter who is interviewing them (ITV)

Education secretary Gillian Keegan might be of the view that no one cares about your A-level results, but it seems rather likely that her F*** and an A*** will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Her 20-second clip on ITV News, featuring an f-bomb followed by an “arse”, is an instant classic. For arrogance and stupidity, there is simply no way it could ever be marked down.

I must have watched it 20 times now and am nowhere near close to the point at which it stops improving on every viewing.

When she – the actual education secretary – spent A-level results day announcing to heartbroken children that no one cares about their A-level results, there was at least a tacit expectation that she wouldn’t say or do anything more stupid than that before the end of the school holidays. Those expectations have been more than surpassed.

At the time of typing, an unknown number of thousands of children will not be returning to an unknown number of hundreds of schools this week, because their classrooms are made of crumbly concrete that has been declared unsafe.

There are many questions that thousands of parents would like answered. They are such things as: “When will the school reopen?” Or, more parochially: “Are you really saying that my child could have had her classroom collapse on top of her?”

There is one question that none of them is asking, but that appears to be the one that Gillian Keegan wants to be asked. And that is, why has no one thanked Gillian Keegan for all her hard work?

Or, to put it verbatim: “Does anyone ever say, ‘You know what, you’ve done a f****** good job because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’? No signs of that, no?”

That’s what, at this moment of mushrooming crisis, Gillian Keegan demands of Daniel Hewitt from ITV News, in comments that have already been wrongly described as a “hot mic” incident. A “hot mic” is what happens when someone says something they shouldn’t say because they’re not on camera but forgets they’re still wearing a TV microphone.

Keegan’s is a whole order above that, a whole new format, frankly. This is a “hot interview”, in which the interviewee somehow forgets they are standing in front of a television camera, giving a television interview, and talking to the news reporter who is interviewing them.

An interview in which, three days on from the breaking of yet another scandal that in normal times could finish off a government but for this lot is all in a week’s work, the education secretary wants to know why the media aren’t thanking her for everything she’s done.

A few hours before Keegan’s comments, the former top civil servant at the Department for Education had been on the radio to say that the problem had partly come about because when his department had pointed out that the fund for school repairs needed to be expanded from a hundred schools a year to several hundred, the then chancellor Rishi Sunak decided instead to slash it from a hundred to 50.

That was the point at which the prime minister might have expected his day to not get any worse. But then, along comes Gillian Keegan to put it even more bluntly.

“Everyone has sat on their arse and done nothing.” Truly, a quote for the ages. You don’t even need to have had your A-level history moderated down to a D to know that it should never be forgotten.