The supercilious headmaster

Keir Starmer walked into the House of Commons like a head walking into a rowdy assembly hall. In one corner Nigel Farage, a schoolboy always on the edge of being in trouble even as teachers struggle to prove their suspicion that he was behind the graffiti outside the school prayer room, sat with his gang. He was talking animatedly, waving his hands as he described something. He’s just got back from a research trip to Washington. It’s possible that at some point before the next election he’ll undertake a similar journey to his constituency of Clacton. All the evidence so far is that he has as much chance of getting a meeting with Donald Trump there as he does in the US.

Headmaster Starmer knows a few ways to silence the rowdiest crowd. His opening remarks covered the Southport murders, the Holocaust and the return of the Israeli hostages. In the gallery, he said, was the mother of a murdered girl. The chamber sensed that it needed to be on its best behaviour. 

Kemi Badenoch, president of the Sixth Form Debating Society, rose for her weekly attempt to discomfort the headmaster. She hasn’t had an easy time of late. Her report card complained that she was spending too much time on her phone, which might have been the reason for her difficulty in focusing on topics. 

Still, she has promised to change her ways. Last week she gave a speech in which she explained that “when you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” The Conservative Party, she went on, was “going to tell them the truth”, though an astonishing stroke of good fortune, this had turned out to also be what her audience had wanted to hear.

Here, at last, we had the beginnings of a good case against the government

So we were excited to learn what truth she would tell us this week. On the other side of the Atlantic, Trump was busy releasing rioters from prison. Was she going to demand Britain follow his example? Some of her MPs seem to feel that the people looting mobile phone shops had simply been provoked into a fact-finding exercise by the limited release of information over the Southport killings. Her Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, had announced that the public had good reason to believe the government was engaged in a “cover-up”. Sadly he didn’t have time to explain what facts were being withheld. Perhaps that content is subscriber-only.

But Badenoch instead announced that she wouldn’t be discussing Southport until after sentencing was complete. Instead she decided to ask about the Schools Bill.

This may have been an attempt to wrong-foot Starmer: he might have expected her to ask about it a fortnight ago, the day the Commons debated it. Or perhaps it was an attempt to defeat the biased mainstream media, with its outdated focus on talking about the issues of the day. But leaving these things aside, the most surprising thing about Badenoch choosing education as her subject is that in general, this is a sensible subject for her to talk about: although a number of schools were falling down when the Conservatives left office, education is an area where on the whole the party did well.

It is also one where Labour’s proposed changes have got a lot of people nervous. Badenoch asked Starmer why he thought this was. It was a question sufficiently vague that he could brush it aside. So was her second question. For the third one, she went for a specific: why was the bill removing the power of schools to vary teacher pay? Schools, she said, should be allowed to keep it. 

Starmer gave us his most supercilious headmaster. If Badenoch “had hopped off social media for a while, she would have seen the amendment put down this morning to achieve that end.” There is debate about whether this is true, but it didn’t entirely dispel the thought that the Tory leader hadn’t done her homework. The prime minister had made quite a big admission: that the government bill was so flawed it was having to remove a key measure, one that the Conservatives had fought them over. Somehow he had been able to use that to score a point against the Tories.

Badenoch moved to her central argument: who did the changes help? “It is not teachers. Their pay is being capped. It is not parents. Their choices are being restricted. It is definitely not children. Their outcomes will get worse. So who is benefiting? It is the trade unions.” Here, at last, we had the beginnings of a good case against the government. 

At the end of their exchange, Starmer did seem as worked up as he has been in any of their exchanges. He stood back from the despatch box, one hand in his pocket and the other pointing up at the Conservative backbenches. If it doesn’t say much to say that this is the best that Badenoch has done, at this school we give marks for improvement.

Ed Davey, who runs the school’s Outward Bound Society, asked Starmer to promise that farmers wouldn’t be sold out in any US trade deal. “We will never lower our standards,” the prime minister replied. Although there were a lot of people in Washington this week who never thought they’d lower their standards. Then they met Donald Trump.