The battle between Tim Loughton and the Education department rumbles on, with new foot soldiers joining the fray. The latest shot fired in the war comes from Labour’s Stephen Twigg, who has demanded an investigation into the quotes we ran on Coffee House last week from a senior DfE source which described the former minister as a ‘lazy incompetent narcissist obsessed only with self-promotion’.
Twigg has written to the department’s Permanent Secretary Chris Wormald, saying the following:
‘You will be aware that both special advisers and civil servants are bound by a code of conduct, which precludes them from making personal attacks.’
In the letter, which you can read in full here, Twigg asks Wormald to investigate whether a breach of the respective codes for SpAds and civil servants has taken place.
The chances are that Michael Gove will get a chance to have his own say on Loughton: the Education Secretary appears before a select committee tomorrow. He will also doubtless want to refute the former children’s minister’s original claims which sparked the row that the children and families agenda was a ‘declining priority’ in his department. But for today, he’s launching his own attack on Twigg’s vocational education policy.
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