To pick this precise moment to give Gavin Williamson a knighthood reveals much about Boris Johnson. Why doesn’t the prime minister just give Gavin a gas field, or a bank, and make him honorary president of British Fencing? No 10 probably felt yesterday was a good day to bury bad news. Instead, there was plenty of fury at the revelation that yet another useless person has been deemed sufficiently useful to Johnson to receive an honour. Sir Gavin joins Lord Lebedev and far too many others. Say hello to the wallygarchy.
Given the ever more horrifying events in Ukraine, this local reward for failure can obviously be regarded as a trifle. On the one hand, it doesn’t exactly matter if Gavin Williamson is made a knight of some corner of an irradiated Europe. On the other, it’s telling that exactly at the moment the occupants of Downing Street are trying to reach for moral stature, they remind you just how small they really are.
One major lesson of the horrors of the past eight days is that we are in a new era. That new era, for those of us with the immeasurable luxury of not being bombed into it, should involve a taking of stock and a moral reset. Values, standards and principles in liberal democracies matter. Some of ours have been allowed to become rather tattered. For instance, we can and must agree that public service is not merely the gateway to cronyism. We can and must agree that political parties being funded by people whose sources of wealth are shadowy is a dangerous and compromising situation that needs urgent remedy. We can and must consider what it means that we have allowed London to become the global capital of choice for laundering the illicit wealth foreign nationals have siphoned out of their own countries. In short, we can and must be better than we have been in many ways, and fast.
Yet knighting Gavin Williamson in the middle of all this suggests we have a way to go. I’m sure some galaxy brain will be on to explain how I’m oversimplifying things, but it does feel like it should have been so much simpler to NOT knight Gavin Williamson. How hard can NOT honouring the worst secretary of state in recent memory really be? It is suspiciously unclear what the man sacked as both defence and education secretary is being honoured for. Services to making Russia go away and shut up? Leaking from a top-level National Security Council meeting and consequently undermining the trust of the intelligence services (denied)? Presiding over an epochal failure of British children, from which significant numbers will never recover educationally or in terms of life chances?
Obviously, we know that the Johnson administration never particularly cared about the schoolchildren – Williamson was kept in post despite his catastrophic failings during the first lockdown and the exams fiasco that inevitably unfolded that summer. In the end, everything about the government’s approach to an entire generation of children can be summarised by the fact that they reopened the pubs before they reopened all the schools. Yet Gavin could find focus when he wanted to. When Christian Wakeford crossed the floor to join Labour earlier this year, the Bury South MP claimed that Williamson had threatened to cancel a new school in his constituency if he did not vote against extending free school meals into the holidays for the poorest children – a conversation Williamson apparently does not remember having.
It’s hard to believe a government that knows all this and still honours Williamson will do the right thing in other areas. Will they clean up the oligarchs to whom they have hitherto shown such sublime indifference or active encouragement, or will they just say that’s what they’re going to do?
They do, after all, say a lot of things. Take the culture secretary. The last time I saw Nadine Dorries cry at work she was sobbing because Boris Johnson had pulled out of his post-referendum leadership bid. Yet here she was on Thursday, turning on the waterworks at the dispatch box, offering the BBC “heartfelt thanks and admiration” for its reporting. Oh Nadine. NOW you’re a fan, is it? Because just weeks ago you were issuing tinpot threats on your Twitter about the BBC as we’ve known it being over. Weirdly, I don’t see Nadine’s precious Netflix dodging the bombs in a Kyiv basement in order to bring the world the news. (I should say that the Beeb is in Kyiv alongside many exceptional journalists from other UK broadcasters – a reminder that the BBC’s unique funding model has always elevated our whole market. Rivals cannot compete for funding, so have traditionally competed on quality. And if you don’t believe it, go and watch a range of American broadcast news for an evening.)
Anyway, amazing that it’s taken actual war in Europe to make the actual culture secretary realise that maybe – just maybe! – the enemy is a station like Russia Today and not the BBC. Like I said, maybe Nadine has realised that. Notwithstanding her tears, I don’t buy it myself. The one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that this government will be trying to cripple the BBC again in a few months, because at that point that particular position will suit them better once again. The Johnson administration doesn’t do immutable principles. They only do expedience. In fact, it’s occasionally hard not to see in Dorries a watered-down version of higher skilled monsters such as Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who yesterday claimed the BBC was being used to undermine Russia’s internal politics and security. She should speak to Nadine. I keep hearing from her and half the rest of the cabinet that the BBC undermines the UK’s internal politics. I can never remember exactly why – I think it’s something to do with talent salaries or running stories about the government that they don’t like.
Either way, the government now seems to be engaged in a number of hasty pivots. If these are genuine, then good. The time for a “let’s not, and say we did” approach has passed. But on the form book, promises to make the British political family completely legitimate are unconvincing. This week the prime minister has managed to knight one of his cronies and not do very much about any of Putin’s.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
