Waking up to the Today programme always carries the risk
that you’ll start the day with a strong urge to hit something. But why oh why
did this morning have to begin with me being subjected to Nevile Gwynne and Michael Gove’s
increasingly vomit-inducing mutual appreciation society?
Gwynne (a retired accountant and old-school Latin teacher
with seemingly no distinguishing qualities) scratched Gove’s back a few months
ago: in a ludicrous publicity stunt for his book ‘Gwynne’s Grammar’, he and his
publishers gave a ‘Bad Grammar Award’ to a group of academics who’d written to
Gove criticising his educational reforms. I thought this smelt fishy at the
time, and it turns out so did a lot of other people – a blog I wrote digging around the subject went unexpectedly viral and still gets more hits every week
than anything I’ve written before or since.
Now it seems Gove has returned the favour. He’s issued a memo to Department for Education civil servants about how to write well, in
which he describes Gwynne’s Grammar as “a brief guide to the best writing style”
- thus giving this tedious old fraud another chance to spout guff on national
radio. (It’s not clear whether copies of Gwynne’s Grammar are being bought at
the taxpayer’s direct expense, or if officials are expected to purchase them
out of their own frozen wages.)
Gwynne duly seized the opportunity to describe Gove as “possibly
the most important person in education there’s been” – what, ever? And that wasn’t even the lowest
point of a truly dismal interview, in which Gwynne was asked piercing questions
like “Ah, so you’re a fan of Michael Gove?” and “But lots of people don’t like
Michael Gove – isn’t there a risk he might put people off buying your clearly
marvellous book?” Interestingly, Gwynne responded to this latter question by
saying darkly, “Well, don’t forget, Mr Gove has got against him, as have I,
pretty much everybody in high places in the academic world.” Oh, you mean like
those academics you conveniently ridiculed in the national press a few months
back for entirely spurious reasons? Still, one thing’s for sure: nobody could
accuse Nevile Gwynne of being an academic. His sole academic qualification is a
BA in Modern Languages, meaning he has about as much claim to be an expert on
grammar as I have to be an expert on political thought.
In fact, I think the lowest point of the interview was probably
when the interviewer asked breathlessly, “So if these officials read your book,
it’s not just that they’ll improve their style, they’ll improve their thinking
as well?” Lest we forget, one of the things I discovered when researching that
blog I mentioned is that Gwynne cannot
write for toffee. His website is a rambling, incoherent mess of
paragraph-long sentences and genuinely ungrammatical nonsense. From everything
I’ve seen of him, his thinking is not much better. Yet the Today programme
treated him with almost ludicrous reverence, acting like he is the world
authority on the English language he so obviously isn’t. At the end of the
interview, John Humphrys even chipped in: “Why is he not Sir Nevile Gwynne, for
heaven’s sake?” Um, maybe because he’s a complete nobody with no real
qualifications who you have inexplicably decided to give airtime to plug his
tedious little book?
Seriously, guys. If you want me to continue running the daily
risk of waking up to George Osborne, you really are going to have to do much better than this.
