Leaks, grades and texts: Gavin Williamson’s political blunders

Gavin Williamson’s return to government under Rishi Sunak has already been marked by a propensity for mishap and controversy, which have tended to follow him around as a minister. Here are the more notable moments of his public ignominy.

‘Don’t puss me about’

Williamson’s current political turmoil predates his appointment by Sunak as a Cabinet Office minister, relating to furious and abusive messages he sent during the summer to Wendy Morton, who was Liz Truss’s chief whip. Incandescent at not being invited to attend the Queen’s funeral, Williamson messaged Morton to say this was “very poor” and seemed to indicate the style of treatment received by MPs not favoured by Truss. “Also don’t forget I know how this works so don’t puss me about,” he wrote, adding: “Well let’s see how many more times you fuck us all over. There is a price for everything.”

Alleged threat as a whip

After the messages to Morton emerged, the Times reported that a female Conservative MP claimed that, when Williamson was chief whip in 2016, he threatened her with potentially revealing details about her private life. The MP, who is now a minister, told the paper that Williamson called her to his office when she was campaigning on a politically sensitive issue and raised something about her private life “which she interpreted as a tacit threat”. An ally of Williamson did not deny the conversation, but said he had raised the personal issue in a “pastoral capacity”.

A-levels fiasco

Williamson lasted just over two years as education secretary under Boris Johnson, but nobody is quite sure how. His low point came with the debacle of A-level grading in 2020, at the peak of the Covid crisis. No one doubted that replacing exam marks with an alternative method of grading students would be difficult. But Williamson was vilified, first for ignoring warnings that it would be a problem, and then, once the obviously unfair marks were in, for standing by the controversial combination of computer algorithm and teacher assessments. There was, inevitably, a U-turn 48 hours later, but by then much of the damage – to students’ university chances and public confidence – had already been done.

Schools and Covid

There is an argument that many of the main decisions regarding school closures and catchup attempts were largely made in Downing Street. But teaching unions had little confidence in Williamson and his department over many associated issues, such as providing laptops and other technology to pupils who needed them, and helping schools become more Covid-secure once they reopened.

Free school meals – and not meeting Marcus Rashford

Again, it was arguably the fault of Boris Johnson that the government twice held out against calls to extend free school meals or meal vouchers for poorer children into holidays, only to subsequently back down under PR pressure from Rashford, the Manchester United footballer and anti-poverty campaigner. However, it was Williamson’s department that was in charge. And it was very much Williamson’s fault when he told a newspaper he had held a Zoom meeting with Rashford, when in fact he had met a different black sportsman, the rugby player Maro Itoje.

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In another situation that would have permanently sunk the career of almost any other politician, Williamson was sacked as defence secretary in 2019 by the then prime minister, Theresa May, who had brought him into the cabinet, initially as chief whip. May said she had seen “compelling” evidence that Williamson leaked information from a meeting of the highly sensitive national security council about the involvement of the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei in the UK’s 5G network. Williamson conceded he had talked to the media, but denied that he had discussed anything about the meeting.

‘Russia should go away and shut up’

It is fair to say that, before his sacking, some had worried that Williamson lacked the necessary gravitas to be defence secretary. This impression crystallised in March 2018 during a question-and-answer session after a speech in Bristol. Asked about the expulsion of Russian intelligence staff from the UK after the Salisbury nerve agent attack, Williamson condemned Russian actions before saying: “Frankly, Russia should go away and should shut up.”