Patrick O’Flynn’s monthly look at UK politics, written exclusively for Political Insight
AUGUST 2020: THE peaks and troughs of the political season tend to follow those of the football season fairly closely. Everything comes to a head in May when trophies and elections are there to be won, followed by a summer lull before the onset of September puts the whole show back on the road.
This year both politics and football have had their calendars disrupted by Covid-19, with elections shelved, trophy finals postponed and stadiums shorn of spectators during matches mirroring an empty Commons chamber when debates and departmental questions were taking place. But in both cases September ushers in a much-needed fresh start.
With party conferences only taking place in truncated, online form this year the Commons is scheduled to sit right from Tuesday September 1. A day or two later the Government will face its biggest political test since the high point of the epidemic. Schools will open their gates to all pupils for the start of the new school year. Or will they?
The auguries are not good. The Government has been through a wretched summer of fiascos, embracing everything from illegal Channel crossings to the A-level debacle. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has made the alleged incompetence of Boris Johnson’s administration his chosen point of attack.
He can almost be heard licking his lips like a vampire before a midnight feast when he speaks of the nation’s expectation that children will resume their normal education. Starmer is clearly banking on the great reopening descending into headlines about locked gates and classroom chaos.
If things do pan out that way – and with the teaching unions seemingly determined to turn “working from home” into the new normal for their members one wouldn’t bet against it – then the political terms of trade may finally shift. The long run of solid Tory poll leads is likely to come to an end.
Boris Johnson, his senior advisers and the beleaguered Education Secretary Gavin Williamson are all aware that the stakes are extremely high. Getting the schools back to normal crops up in polls and focus groups as the one area that cuts through with voters who have by and large been prepared to cut ministers plenty of slack during the fight against the coronavirus.
Both Mr Williamson and the Prime Minister himself have explicitly acknowledged the importance of this goal. Should it not be attained then it is perfectly possible that the electorate will reserve some of its ire for Starmer and his recalcitrant trade union allies. But there is little doubt that it will be the Government and the Prime Minister who take the lion’s share of the blame.
Ministers must try to avoid finding themselves in the position of stamping their feet in sterile fury and yelling the political equivalent of “it’s not fair!” if lots of schools do not open fully after more than five months of offering only a skeleton service.
Voters are more usually interested in the question of whether a government has a grip than on hearing its excuses for failure. Edward Heath famously called an election in 1974 on the question of “Who runs Britain?” when the National Union of Miners was over-reaching itself. But the answer came back from the electorate: “Well, clearly not you then.”
Naturally the extent of preparations that ministers have made to ensure normal schooling resumes is confidential. They may even be in a rock solid position, with a secret “shadow” workforce ready to roll in the event of lots of teachers refusing to go into school – rather like Rupert Murdoch was when he switched production of his newspapers to a new plant in Wapping in the 1980s. They may have hatched a legally-watertight plan to stop the pay of staff who do not turn up to work.
But from this vantage point it does not seem terribly likely that Williamson and his cerebral deputy Nick Gibb have that degree of street-fighting nous.
Johnson himself may well seek to use the bully pulpit of being a PM with a big majority to harness the power of public opinion against the teaching unions, piling parental pressure on teachers to get back to school after five months away. But one hopes that is not all Downing Street has got in its locker.
Because these days the teaching profession is dominated by people with a left-wing outlook who will be naturally hostile to this Government and not inclined to be cajoled by it. A Times Educational Supplement poll published just before last December’s general election found that 49 per cent of teachers planned to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, 22 per cent Lib Dem and a derisory 14 per cent Tory.
Make no mistake, if the Great Schools Reopening goes badly wrong then the Government will be pitched into a new first order crisis capable of entering political folk lore in the manner of the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 that did for the premiership of Jim Callaghan.
With his majority of 80 and four years left to run before another election is required, things would not be nearly as desperate for Johnson as they were for Callaghan. But major reconstructive surgery on his administration would become politically inevitable. Williamson would be gone, probably along with half a dozen other Cabinet ministers adjudged weak or too wet-behind-the-ears to lead major departments. The search would instead be on for grizzled veterans ripe for a recall to the top team.
No wonder that as they prepare to return to their desks in Whitehall, several Cabinet ministers realise that it is not only Williamson’s head that is likely to be on the chopping block if another fiasco ensues.
Often at the very top of politics a quiet relish is taken at the spectacle of a senior colleague in trouble because ministers think “at least that takes the pressure off me” or “there’s another rival falling by the wayside”.
As the late Alan Clark noted in his Diaries: “There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.”
But right now most of the Cabinet understands that another trace of blood could easily herald a feeding frenzy that devours more than one political career.