You have to hand it to them. Most political parties would have chosen to go quiet, what with it being the middle of August and having next to nothing to say. But Reform are made of stronger stuff. They aren’t bothered that the only interesting thing about them at the moment is that they are fighting like rats in a sack. They seem to wear that as a badge of honour. A coming of age sophistication. So for the second time in a week they called a press conference.
Obviously there was no sign of Nigel Farage. He is still in hiding, avoiding answering questions on Reform’s unusual funding models and perhaps having therapy to recover from his humiliating byelection adventure. Nor were we to be graced with Zia Yusuf who is now close to becoming a persona non grata in the party having picked fights with almost everyone. It’s just that no one, least of all Tim Montgomerie, is allowed to say so until Nige works out what to do about him.
So that left this presser in the shaky hands of Richard Tice and Suella Braverman. Dicky is ubiquitous these days. Mainly because he’s too dim not to realise that not all publicity is good publicity. Perhaps he can’t resist the attention or feeling of freedom he gets when not umbilically attached to Nige. It allows him to believe that he is a fully sentient, independent being. Rather than one of the last clowns standing in the circus.
It was Dicky who got us under way, trying not to look too grumpy that the weather had turned and rain was forecast. He seems to prefer the smell of smoke, the thrill of fire-fighters risking their lives to but put wildfires and the threat of drought. Speaking at the headquarters of a decorating company in Enfield, Dicky didn’t mince his words. He wasn’t going to congratulate those students who had got their A-level results last week or their GCSE results today.
Why? Because almost certainly 80% of them had either underperformed or wasted their time on taking “Mickey Mouse” subjects. Why bother with modern languages? It’s foreigners who should be learning English. And they could forget history. Just a load of crap about stuff that had happened a long time ago. The trouble with school was that you end up learning a whole lot of stuff you’ll never need. All this bullshit about learning to think was completely over-rated.
Dicky was here to extol the benefits of being an apprentice. Now he came over positively dreamy. He had been an apprentice once, he said. He could clearly remember his first day on a construction site digging trenches with a JCB. It had been the making of him. Why, it was only a matter of a few years before he was CEO of his own property company. He omitted to mention that the business he was running was the family firm started by his grandfather. But don’t think for a minute that Dicky was just another nepo baby. He had got where he had in life on merit. It takes skill to turn a large fortune into a small one.
Here was the thing. Children were being held back by their schools. By their own limited imaginations. These days kids should learn to choose their own parents a bit better. That’s a life skill children should be taught in school. And start to think outside the box. When most people thought of apprenticeships they turned to manual labour. But the possibilities were so much greater than that. Today’s kids should get with the programme. There must be hundreds of apprenticeships in dodgy crypto deals, money laundering and offshore accounts.
Suella had tried and failed not to look too patronising; while Dicky had been wittering on. You get the feeling she still feels apprenticeships are something for other people’s kids rather than her own. But she was starting at a huge disadvantage when explaining the new Reform offering. It obviously didn’t help that the government had already spelled out its own rather more thought-through apprenticeship scheme, so the morning was something of a waste of everyone’s time.
But what really stuck in the throat was that Suella spent the first five or so minutes saying that the government had let down students over the past 15 years. Now either Suella is suffering from extreme memory loss or she imagines the rest of us are. Because until January this year she had been a Tory MP and a senior cabinet minister in successive Conservative governments. And now she was expecting us to take her seriously.
Then Suella got to the nitty gritty. Businesses were to be helped to take on apprenticeships. Much like they were under Labour. And she was going to cancel any degrees that weren’t strictly vocational and close down almost every university because they were a waste of time. Mere generators of student debt. She spat out the phrase “gender studies”. She wouldn’t be happy until she had annihilated a higher education sector worth billions of pounds. Her legacy would be to turn Oxford University into Oxford Technical College.
It was Dicky who fielded most of the questions. After all, why wouldn’t you get the most half-witted person in the room to clarify your education policies? The BBC pointed out that student loans actually qualified as borrowing on the government balance sheet. This seemed to take Dicky by surprise but, like the bullshitter he is, he chose to plough on anyway. “Cash is cash,” he declared triumphantly as if revealing a wonder of the universe. It certainly is for Reform. This will be written on the party’s gravestone.
We moved on to Reform’s latest contributions to the light entertainment industry. The squabbles. The fuck ups. Dicky’s eyes lit up. Things were going great. Had never been better. The infighting was just day-to-day disagreements. And Nige had had a huge triumph in Clacton. No one had ever beaten a man with a bin on his head so comprehensively. It had been such a success that Reform was looking forward to going through the whole process again if a recall petition is triggered following the conclusion of a parliamentary standards investigation. The summer of fun just gets better and better.
