If Boris Johnson cared about schools, he’d already have sacked Gavin Williamson

Not much is constant about Britain’s handling of the pandemic, but one rule applies throughout: there is no scenario so bad that it cannot be made worse with Gavin Williamson in charge of schools.

Closing classrooms is demoralising for parents, teachers and children. The prospect of cancelled exams for a second year compounds the stress. Months of disrupted education will wound a generation. Poorer families will bear the deepest scars. There is no quick policy solution, but it is possible to imagine that remedies exist. Government cannot fix everything, but it must be capable of something.

It is not the task itself that induces despair, but the identity of the man whose job it is to complete it. Williamson’s record allows only expectation of failure. The unknown element is whether he will inflict the damage by negligence or more assertive sabotage.

Will his next adventure in maladministration look like last summer’s exam grades fiasco, when the education department had months to prepare for a predictable problem and was still ambushed? Or will it be something more proactively malevolent, as when he threatened legal action against councils that wanted to shut schools before Christmas, thus forcing them to stay open for a few gratuitous days of viral proliferation?

An education secretary possessing even flimsy scruples might, in recent weeks, have got to grips with practical challenges: sourcing laptops for remote learning, equipping venues to safely teach children who cannot stay at home. Instead English schools were shut with less than a day’s notice, after a Christmas holiday during which headteachers had been told the priority was arranging the Covid tests that would allow them to stay open. They did open, but for just one day: a bonus round of infections before the U-turn.

Resources and goodwill have been squandered with a thoroughness that would make more sense as deliberate villainy – a plot to induce staffroom stress – except Williamson is not capable of implementing a conspiracy that effective.

Administrative inadequacy is aggravated by the absence of any passion for the portfolio. There is no evidence that the secretary of state has any notion of what education is even for, or how it fits into some wider national story. His only known expertise in the field is the fact of having once been to school himself. And it is unclear how much attention he was paying then.

He is despised by teachers. He has alienated even the moderate wing of the trade unions. It is never easy for Tory ministers to win trust in the staffroom, but Williamson has fulfilled the caricature of ideological provocateur with spiteful relish, casting teachers as slackers and saboteurs.

In a recent survey where frontline staff were asked whom they would trust with the decision on whether it was safe to go into the classroom, Williamson came a distant last – miles behind scientific advisers, local authorities, Public Health England, headteachers and trade unions. Respondents were allowed to tick multiple boxes, and still the education secretary got just 1% of the vote.

The rebarbative side of his character is notorious in government. It is not unusual for advisers and MPs to whisper unkind things to journalists about ministers, but the acridity of what is poured on Williamson by his own party is unique and mostly unprintable. The kinder accounts dwell only on his abject ineptitude, but most include chapters on deviousness, duplicity and vindictiveness. It is said that he styles himself as a Machiavellian operator with an ostentatious immaturity that undermines any plot he might undertake – a homage to House of Cards in cruel, humourless slapstick.

All of which raises the question of why he is in the cabinet. Williamson’s incompetence was not a secret. He failed at defence before he got his hands on education. His memorable contributions in the security arena were the playground exhortation that Russia should “go away and shut up”, and his dismissal by Theresa May after the leaking of secret information. He denied that one, but steam was still rising from the disgrace when, just three months later, Johnson tapped Williamson for the education job.

The only credentials that mattered to the new prime minister were loyalty and readiness to defend the most extreme Brexit. Williamson had been a remainer for David Cameron, and a defender of May’s doomed deal when she was his benefactor. When May resigned, Williamson adopted a more hardline position instantly and without qualm, like a true mercenary. It did not take Johnson long to see the utility of a man as lacking in principle as himself. What might happen to schools was never a consideration.

Yet, by now, Johnson must see that repetitive failure in that department damages his own reputation. The pandemic has generated countless painful dilemmas for Downing Street, but the choice between keeping the current education secretary and putting almost anyone else in charge is at the easier end of the spectrum. The argument that a crisis needs consistency of personnel does not apply when the person in question is a walking engine spewing out more crisis.

A popular view in Westminster last year, when Williamson was barely flexing the full extent of his uselessness, was that Johnson kept him on so as to sacrifice him at a later date. The reviled minister might soak up more public opprobrium before being discarded. But the rag is now saturated and rank. Another theory is that Williamson has some sinister leverage dating back to his time as chief whip: that he knows where bodies are buried, having served as executioner and undertaker.

Perhaps Johnson avoids sacking people for incompetence through fear of signalling that competence matters, and that success in politics should be measured by capable policy delivery. That is not the prime minister’s favourite test.

Williamson will go, eventually, once the stench of having him around exceeds Johnson’s reluctance to deal with foul messes. It is hard to predict when that point will come. The prime minister’s nose is accustomed to the smell of bad government, but he can see other people recoil.

Sacking the education secretary would not automatically make things better. But it would at least eliminate one compelling reason to keep expecting the worst.