Is Gavin Williamson racist or incompetent? Helen Whately just can’t decide

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I’m certainly not the first person to point this out, but we truly live in a time when events on the ground, shall we say, are far more ridiculous than anything a satirist would dare to imagine. So let me start this article with a verbatim transcript of a conversation this morning between LBC Nick Ferrari and Minister of Care Helen Whately.

Nick Ferrari: Is it [Gavin Williamson] racist or incompetent?

Helen Whately: Honestly, I don’t know.

Ferrari: So that could be racism?

Whately: I can’t believe for a moment that it is. I think that sounds highly unlikely.

Ferrari: So he’s incompetent?

Whately goes on to say that this is a false choice, which of course it is not. What she means is that she doesn’t want to choose, which isn’t quite the same. You can’t really blame her. We imagine that it’s not that fun to wonder if your colleague is a) racist or b) incompetent. But since most of us are not in the Conservative Party, we will probably never know. These questions don’t tend to arise in other areas of work, do they? For example, I never made it to the office, was rushed into a meeting room and asked if the guy in the accounts was racist or incompetent. Have you got? It must be a matter of politics.

Whatelys miserable morning it all dates back to an interview Gavin Williamson gave to the Evening Standard in which he appeared to confuse a black footballer, Marcus Rashford, with a black rugby player, Maro Itoje. The education secretary was asked if he had met with Rashford to discuss his free school meals campaign. Yes, he had. Absoutely. We met on Zoom and he seemed incredibly engaged, compassionate and charming, but then he had to shoot, Williamson explained. I didn’t want to be the one holding him back from his training. A little scrum, maybe, or line training.

Alas, Williamson was confused. Or incompetent. Or racist. Because the man he had met on Zoom was not, in fact, Marcus Rashford but Maro Itoje. Doesn’t look great, does it? Williamsons advisers therefore issued a hasty clarification, and then pushed the minister to make another statement, which, once again, is worth printing in its entirety: Towards the end of an extensive interview in which I talked about both the laptops and the school lunch campaigns, I confused the issues and made a real mistake. We corrected this with the reporter before the story was published. I have immense respect for Marcus Rashford and Maro Itoje, who lead effective and inspiring campaigns.

Rashford and Itoje saw the funny side. Due to recent speculation, I thought it was necessary to confirm that I am not Marcus Rashford, Itoje tweeted. And for that Williamson should be eternally grateful because, whether racist or not, it would, I think, be possible to conclude, on the whole, that confusing two prominent black sports stars is actually quite a thing. racist to do. Or, hey, maybe it’s just incompetence.

And so we have to go back to where we started and Nick Ferraris questions to Whately: [Gavin Williamson] racist or incompetent? Now, it’s not my job to answer that, but what I will say is that the overwhelming evidence suggests that the Education Secretary is indeed incompetent. Very well. I have a word limit but there was the exam algorithm fiasco; there was his idea of ​​making the schoolchildren sing a song with the lyrics, Strong Britain, great nation; there was the moment when he couldn’t remember his results at level A; endless and infuriating cultural wars.

What I mean is Whately could have eased Nick Ferraris’ question by confidently stating the bleeding obvious. Yes, my colleague Gavin Williamson is incompetent. There you go, Nick. And to be fair, Williamson really wouldn’t have bothered. He probably would have thought she was talking about Dominic Raab.

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