Whitehall speechwriters excel at taking commonplace observations, shoddily constructed straw men, and inappropriately vague invective and constructing the kind of tight ten minutes that gets clipped down to seven seconds on local radio news.
The gods of public policy granted us two absolute gifts of that nature this morning – Katharine Birbalsingh’s headline-grabbing intervention on aiming for the next rung rather than the stars (an “inaugural address” for somebody in post since 2021), and Michelle Donelan’s selection box of quality and standards apocalypticism mysteriously used to back up Edward Peck’s appointment as Student Support Champion.
