Watching Jamie’s return to the school meals debate made most viewers feel warm and fuzzy about England’s children, about to be saved by the cheeky chappie. Inspirational stuff, but the most important scenes were when Jamie met Alan Johnson and then Tony Blair. Mr Johnson’s limp performance can hardly have helped his aspirations to be Deputy PM. Similarly, Tony’s sucking up sounded like a black hole imploding.
Jamie may be on the right track but he’s not the first to propose better school meals, more money, improved kitchens and training. The Caroline Walker Trust and others have been pushing these very ideas to successive Secretaries of State, the Prime Minister and civil servants for a decade, and to the Conservatives before that. All that’s changed is that you now have a young media star saying the same things and getting some action. The result’s great, but it does highlight the total captivity of politicians to media pressure. There is something very wrong when politicians and their ever-growing legion of special advisors ignore their own experts and civil servants, but bow and scrape to anyone famous (and more particularly anyone who is in the magazines, newspapers and television).
So what can businesses in education learn from the Jamie phenomenon? Simply that if you want to influence any aspect of government policy then abandon any strategies that rely on fact and information or building up rapport with civil servants. Instead it’s about money; you either need to make a donation to a pet cause (Academy Schools, School Food Trust, the Labour party, etc) or you pay a celebrity to front your cause. Either way will get you access to Ministers and Special Advisors who in the current climate are the only ones who really matter. No wonder the civil service is demoralised, it has as many talented people as in the private sector but they are so marginalised by their bosses it’s a wonder they turn up to work.
St Jamie shows the pathos of food politics.
