Is Nicky Morgan the biggest hypocrite in politics?
Recently, nicky Morgan boasted of how much she was enjoying her new incarnation as a backbench rebel since she was sacked from the cabinet by theresa May last summer.
‘I’m revelling in being in the awkward squad,’ she proclaimed.
It is quite a change for the former education Secretary, who used to be distinguished by her unswerving loyalty to the tory establishment.
Since her demotion, a mutinous side has regularly been on display in her embittered attacks on the Government’s approach to Brexit, as she wails about the dangers of international isolation and domestic bigotry. this week, as theresa May formally enacted Article 50 to begin Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, Morgan was at it again.
Sharing a platform with arch europhiles, labour’s chris leslie and the liberal Democrats’ nick clegg, at an event organised by Open Britain — the embittered Remain lobby under another name — Morgan blathered pompously about holding the Government to ‘account’ over any future EU deal.
Worse, she denounced her own party’s immigration policy as ‘socially divisive’, although she stood at the last two general elections on a tory pledge to reduce net migration to the ‘ tens of thousands’. no wonder she has been dubbed Ms U-turn, after a succession of other sharp policy changes when she was in cabinet.
In a further burst of fashionable oh-soliberal ‘virtue signalling’, she argued that the tory target was arbitrary, since 101,000 is ‘unacceptable, but if you have 99,000 that’s OK’. So what is Mrs Morgan’s target? Or does she, like her beloved EU, just believe in completely open borders, which is precisely what the British people voted against in the EU referendum last June?
In recent days, Morgan has been just as critical about government plans to open a new wave of grammar schools.
Writing in the left-wing Observer newspaper, the weekend house journal of the chattering metropolitan elite, she joined clegg — her new political best friend — and the labour MP lucy Powell to spout every cliché about the progressive orthodoxy.
‘now is not the time for more division or political ideology in education,’ the trio moaned, as if opposition to selection were not in itself profoundly ideological.
‘those championing selection as the silver bullet for tackling social mobility, or as the panacea for creating good new school places, are misguided,’ they also wrote, ignoring the reality that the destruction of grammars has contributed hugely to the collapse in social mobility in recent decades.
‘Having the brightest children in comprehensive schools helps raise standards for all,’ they claimed — a contradiction of all the evidence about poor levels of attainment across the state system.
MORGAN’S opinion was not just flawed, but reeked of hypocrisy. When she was education Secretary in the cameron government, she approved an extension of selective education. She decided that the Weald of Kent Grammar School for girls, in tonbridge, should be allowed to build a new satellite school in nearby Sevenoaks for 450 pupils, even though the idea had been rejected by her predecessor Michael Gove.
‘Why would I deny a good school the right to expand?’ she asked in justification of her decision. Ironically, her stance was denounced by lucy Powell, now her fellow Observer columnist, who complained: ‘your approval today of this new school suggests that you are now intent on increasing selection in our schools system by the back door.’
So here we have Ms U-turn making the political equivalent of another screeching handbrake turn. If she didn’t believe in grammar schools when she was in office, why didn’t she resign, rather than promote such a policy?
Or could it be that her latest position on selective education is coloured by the fact that former grammar school girl Mrs May — who sacked Morgan last year — is such a vocal supporter of them?
there is an egregious personal double standard here.
nicky Morgan enjoyed an expensive education at a private school in South-West london before studying law at Oxford University. So she was able to enjoy excellence in her schooling, yet wants to deny the same life chances to others less fortunate.
It is the same story with her Observer co-author nick clegg, who peddles egalitarian clichés despite having been educated at the exclusive public school of Westminster (annual boarding fees: £36,000).
But then, as she shows in her current hand-wringing stance on immigration and the EU, hypocrisy and inconsistency have run through so much of Morgan’s political career since she was first elected as MP for loughborough in 2010.
THIS is the woman who voted against same-sex marriage in 2013 because she said it offended her conscience as a christian.
‘Marriage to me is between a man and a woman,’ she told her local paper. yet when she was appointed education Secretary and equalities Minister the following year, she performed a volteface, eagerly embracing the entire gay rights agenda. She even flew a ‘transgender remembrance’ flag over the Department for education ‘ as a mark of respect for all transgender people who have suffered discrimination’.
In the same vein, as a junior treasury Minister, she introduced rules that cracked down on the entitlement of jobless migrants to claim benefits for their children. Moreover, she removed the automatic right of access to trans- lation services for immigrants, warning non-english speakers that they would ‘face sanctions’ if they did not learn the language.
yet today, in her passionate opposition to Brexit, she likes to pose as the high priestess of compassion towards migrants.
last October, she warned a socalled ‘hard Brexit allows people to say things about their fellow citizens that promote intolerance and bigotry’, while on another occasion she eagerly quoted a Remainer constituent who feared we are ‘ closing our doors to migrants in desperate need of our humanity’. If she really felt that, why did she vote for Article 50 this year in Parliament? Morgan also likes to parade her feminist credentials. Only yesterday, she condemned the Mail’s light-hearted ‘legs-it’ story about the styles of theresa May and nicola Sturgeon, calling it ‘deliberately demeaning’. yet last autumn, she indulged in distinctly unsisterly abuse of Mrs May’s dress sense after the PM wore £ 995 leather trousers for a photoshoot. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much on anything apart from my wedding dress,’ she said cattily. Morgan received the backlash she deserved, particularly after it was pointed out that she was regularly seen with a £950 Mulberry handbag. Her defence, that the bag was a gift, did nothing to rectify the damage. Fellow tory backbencher nadine Dorries described her as one of ‘the ragged band of nutcase europhiles’ who ‘will find any excuse to take a potshot at the Prime Minister’. When, soon after, Morgan failed to show up for a long-booked appearance on the BBC show Have I Got news For you, her place was taken by a handbag. In its christmas 2016 edition, satirical magazine Private eye published a nativity scene in which Morgan featured as a shepherd, declaring: ‘leather looks good on a cow.’ According to an interview she gave — inevitably — to the Guardian, she was so proud of this image that she had it framed and placed in her downstairs cloakroom. In all her posturing, fulminations against Brexit and denunciations of grammar schools, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that nicky Morgan is motivated solely by a dislike for theresa May and a ludicrously high opinion of herself. Just how ludicrous is illustrated by her belief that she was a potential successor to David cameron, and thus the next female PM after Mrs thatcher. She had spoken openly of her prospects of reaching the summit: ‘I hope, in the not-too-distant future, there will be another female leader,’ she declared, with a barely concealed nudge and wink. yet the truth is her political career has been characterised by lack of credibility and authority. Her record as a minister was dismal, especially in her role as education Secretary, where — to the delight of the teaching unions — she became notorious for her reversals of policy. not surprisingly, in a poll on the website conservative Home in 2015, she was backed by just 1 per cent of tory supporters. early in her career, Morgan stood unsuccessfully as a candidate at the 2001 General election in labour-held Islington South and Finsbury. that area of london, synonymous with leftwing luvvies, now seems to be her spiritual home.