So I was not surprised when Michael Gove became the first recipient of a civil service, Labour, BBC attack. The 'offence' seemed small, misinformation corrected within 24 hours, but the BBC went big on the story - attack, attack, attack. So was it an honest mistake that lead Michael Gove to make his inconsistent reports? The Mail thinks that there may be more to the story than this as:
'The £220,000-a-year quango boss blamed for landing education Secretary Michael Gove in trouble over new school buildings had his £40,000 bonus scrapped by Mr Gove last month.
Tim Byles, chief executive of Partnership for Schools (PfS), the body in charge of the £45 billion Building Schools for the Future programme, faced demands from MPs that he be sacked yesterday following claims that his organisation is 'a shambles'.
...
Now, according to well-placed sources, an investigation into how Mr Gove made the blunder has pointed the finger of blame at Mr Byles.
And the sources have disclosed that one of Mr Gove's first acts on becoming education Secretary was to scrap Mr Byles's £40,000 bonus as part of the Government's blitz on quangos.
'The list that caused all the trouble was drawn up not by the Department for education but by PfS,' said a source. 'It wasn't a clerical error or a database mix-up. The database itself was wrong because of information management failings by PfS.'
The angry backlash led to a fierce behind-the-scenes row between the Government and PfS. Sources say Mr Byles, 51, denied he was to blame.
'The Department for education was told it just wasn't possible to produce details with the degree of accuracy they wanted,' said one.
But a Government insider hit back: 'PfS should have known what stage each school was at in the process. It was set up to run the school buildings programme. If they aren't up to speed with that, then what is the point of its existence? It is a shambles.''
I wonder if Ed Balls had any chats with civil servants in his department about how they should act in the event of finding themselves serving Michael Gove...
2 comments:
It's still going on.
I don't know if you caught this lunchtime's 'Politics Show'. Jon Sopel began by launching yet another attack on Michael Gove, saying (among other things)that "it's hard to see the education secretary Michael Gove being let off the naughty step anytime soon."
Mr Gove has behaved in a way his Labour counterpart would never have behaved - he accepted responsibility for something, even though he wasn't personally guilty of doing anything wrong. He protected his staff, as politicians of old used to do as a matter of principle, rather than just hanging them out to dry. He behaved, to use a very out-of-fashion term, honourably.
The man is a credit to the government.
Accepting responsibility, behaving honourably, having principles - no wonder the BBC detest him so much, what a total contrast to almost all of the rabble that have been in power in this country for the last 13 years.
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