The government has had a busy week trying to deal with the school buildings crisis. This hasn’t involved doing anything about all the dangerous school buildings – it’s far too late for that. That’s not the job of modern politicians anyway: their aim isn’t to improve the country, merely to evade responsibility for its shortcomings. Navigate towards the popular things and away from the unpopular and/or disastrous ones.
Thus, Rishi Sunak’s main intervention into the issue of large lumps of flimsy concrete mouldering above thousands of schoolchildren’s flimsier heads has been to assert that it is “completely and utterly wrong” to blame him for it. The topic of blaming the prime minister hasn’t arisen just because he’s the head of the government and so, when there’s a catastrophic failure in the state’s duty to its people, the buck stops with him. No, it was suggested that it was specifically his fault.
