To Smith Square: scene of Tory triumphs of the recent past. And tonight it was the turn of Gillian Keegan to produce her own bravura display. Amid speculation that the under-fire Education Secretary might not show, Keegan – the much-touted speaker at tonight’s Women2Win event for Tories in Communications – arrived at the inHouse offices to deliver a defiant retort to her critics in the Fourth Estate. ‘One of the very first people who helped me in the media was inHouse Communications’ said Keegan, before pausing and adding: ‘I think I might need another session’ and after laughter: ‘I don’t want to learn how to stop swearing but maybe the mic thing…’
With regards to the ongoing debate about RAAC, Keegan joked to the assembled spinners, hacks and comms professionals that: ‘I haven’t read the press. I think it must be awful because I’ve had people get in touch with me from Australia, Dubai, Panama, Belgium, Germany – Spain a lot.’ She then said of some of her (unnamed) press critics that, ‘They’re not journalists – they’re sensationalists’ and remarked drily: ‘I have worked in the corporate world for my whole entire life, as you can see every day in the Daily Mail, whether it’s my watch or my houses or my shoes — they haven’t clocked the bag yet, but they will.’ Keegan also noted how the Telegraph doorstepped her parents while she was in Spain:
They apparently spoke to one of my neighbours. Now my neighbours are – well, one of them’s not there, one of them’s a recluse, and the other one’s got dementia, and they’re all Spanish, so I don’t know what they got.
There was, however, some praise for what Keegan called the ‘Devil Wears Prada does politics’ photograph of her yesterday entering No. 10 in sunglasses:
I went up to the paparazzi with the picture and I said “Which one of you took this?” And they are all shit scared of me because I’m like, you know, “Which one of you took this?”… and then one of them sort of went “Me” and I said “Right, all you, follow him, because this guy is fantastic.” That’s what you want to be doing, not those other ones you’ve had in in where I look terrible.
Away from the schools row, Keegan eulogised T-levels, recalling doing a ‘virtual student to an open day’ in which ‘I came away, surprisingly wanting to do building, construction, surveying and design because it just looked so cool – in fact after this week, I wish I’d have done it.’
In concluding her speech, the Chichester MP told the assembled Tories that ‘If ever you want to know a reason in the difference of being a Conservative or a Labour politician, look at the track record on education’ before pointing to the party’s efforts on school standards, social mobility and apprenticeships. She ended with a round of Q&A that concluded with a question about what the party could do to ensure the future of private schools at risk of closure:
The main thing we’re going to do is make sure we don’t have a Labour government because they would put VAT on private schools, which would mean that all of those – and when they talk about this and it’s real politics of envy stuff because there are 2,350 private schools, a lot of them at the sort of lower end in terms of fees and in terms of, you know, the ability to survive and they will go.
A taste of what’s to come in the forthcoming election, perhaps?
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