Gillian Keegan has apologised after being caught swearing on camera while expressing frustration about the crumbling concrete crisis in schools, claiming “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she tried to fix the problem.
The education secretary made the comments shortly after finishing an interview with ITV News, when the camera was still filming. In a seemingly unguarded moment, the cabinet minister also lamented how nobody had told her she was doing a “fucking good job”.
Apparently referring to challenging questions from the reporter, Daniel Hewitt, Keegan said, exasperatedly: “Does anyone ever say, ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing.’ No signs of that, no?”
It was not clear if Keegan was referring to her cabinet contemporaries, her predecessors or both. A Downing Street source described the comments as “completely wrong”.
In a follow-up interview, Keegan told broadcasters it was an “off-the-cuff remark after the news interview had finished, or apparently after it finished”.
“I would like to apologise for my choice language. That was unnecessary,” she said.
The risk of potential collapse from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), which was used to build many schools and other public buildings from the 1950s to 1990s, has been known for years. It has come into even clearer focus since 2018, when the roof of a Raac-built school in Kent collapsed, at the weekend when no pupils or teachers were there.
Asked about Keegan’s comment in a TV clip, Keir Starmer said: “I think this whole situation is descending into farce. The government has dropped the ball here, failed to prepare.”
The Labour leader said: “The prime minister bears responsibility for some of the key decisions along the way. And instead of coming out today and saying ‘This is what we’re going to do to fix the problem, which we have made a lot worse’, you’ve got members of the cabinet coming out trying to blame other people, trying to blame people within their own teams and to say, essentially, ‘Put responsibility anywhere but on the government’.”
Munira Wilson, the education spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, said: “Gillian Keegan’s disgraceful comments add insult to injury for parents who’ve seen their children’s return to school ruined by this concrete crisis.”
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While Keegan won praise for funding a deal with teachers over pay, ending months of strikes, reviews of her response to the current crisis have been more mixed, with some saying she has sounded complacent by stressing repeatedly that only a small proportion of schools were at risk of collapse.
One former government adviser said of Keegan: “She has one of those very big personalities which can work well in some contexts, but is a style that can be a problem when it collides with reality.”
Keegan has been education secretary since October and is the sixth person to hold the position since the 2019 election.
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