The Education Secretary has refused to admit his A-Level grades as they were “awful”.
As hundreds of thousands of students across the UK collected their results on Thursday, James Cleverly said he regretted “messing” up his own exams.
He said he did not "misbehave" at school but had “stopped working” during his college years and then joined the army after sitting his A-Levels.
Mr Cleverly, who is the sixth Education Secretary in just five years, told Good Morning Britain: "I just didn’t do any work and my exam results reflected quite accurately the amount of effort I had put in.
“My military career was then cut short and I really regretted messing up my A-Levels. But I got to university and I got into politics.
"I’m now Secretary of State for Education.
“So I managed to get back on the horse, but don’t ask me what my results were. I do remember but I’m not going to tell you. They were awful. I’m not going to tell you.”
On last year's results day then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson claimed he had "forgotten" his A-Level results when asked how he faired.
Grades this year are lower after being inflated during the pandemic to account for the disruption pupils faced.
The first cohort of students to sit exams since Covid hit face a battle for university places this year after a drop in grades and institutions becoming more conservative about the numbers they admit.
Admissions service Ucas acknowledged that universities had become more cautious about their offers.
The overall pass rate - grades A* to E - was 98.4 per cent in 2022, down slightly from the 99.5 per cent last year but above the 97.6 scored in 2019.
Mr Cleverly said students should not be “overly concerned” if they received lower results than they were predicted.
He told LBC: “We had a plan and the plan was to get students back into schools to learn, back into exams to be assessed and for those exam grades to consciously be not quite as generous as they were in previous years.
“That plan looks as if it is playing out. So students may get a grade slightly lower than their predicted grades. But the other point I would make is that that is not unusual. In normal years, only about 20 per cent of students get the predicted grades or better, 80 per cent of students get less than predicted grades.
“They should not get overly concerned about that, because it’s a plenty of great places and plenty great institutions.”
