The Blob is back with a vengeance – and the Tories aren’t ready for it

In what I supposed we should see as a sign of progress, the government has decided not to destroy its own school reforms, by revoking the first 18 clauses of the recently-published Schools Bill. I disclosed two weeks ago in the Daily Telegraph that many ex-ministers were up in arms at what they saw as the revenge of ‘The Blob’, the bureaucratic forces that have been against school reform.

The Schools Bill said that, rather than be self-governing, academy schools would lose control over the ‘nature and quality of education,’ ‘procedures and criteria for admission,’ ‘suitability of staff’ and ‘the spending of money’. In other words: pretty much everything. It would have been a stunning power grab by the civil service, representing the re-centralisation of schools and the cremation of the original Michael Gove agenda.

We’re now told that Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was not really serious and intended this as a placeholder. He’s a reformer and I can believe him. To his immense credit he has moved quickly to remove the appalling legislation that his department published. But it makes you ask: why was this released in the first place? My concern is that rushing out legislation that is not ready shows a wider government meltdown, happening at quite a pace. Zahawi may well have been ordered to rush this out, passed the order down – and ended up with something that could have been jointly written by Ed Balls and Jeremy Corbyn. This is the Whitehall default, and without active management by a switched-on Tory team it will prevail. That’s why I think that the biggest threat to Tory reforms is not a Labour government but an imploding Tory government: and that is close to what we’re having already.

But one thing does work well: the House of Lords. When I wrote about the horrors of the Schools Bill, I was contacted by a few Tories appalled at this lack of control – one of them asked who had briefed me, suggesting that I was somehow the pawn of someone who hated Zahawi or Boris or both. I replied that no one briefed me: it was all in Lords Hansard because that upper chamber had lots of former schools ministers – Baker, Agnew, Adonis – who blew the whistle loud and clear. They made their case in parliament and forced the government into an immediate retreat. That’s why I’m no great advocate of Lords reform: as a chamber it shouldn’t work, but it does. The rest of the government should work, but doesn’t. Dangerous times.