The government’s approach to exams is the same as everything else it does: make deranged choices and watch Britain burn

Ministers like Gavin Williamson are just following rules when they propose something mad, stick to it despite opposition and U-turn on the basis that nobody could have possibly foreseen any issues

Imagine if any student wrote an exam paper in the way the government has handled the issue of marking the exams. They’d write “The main cause of the First World War was the Mona Lisa, which was written in 1985 by Catherine the Great.” Then they’d insist this was “fair and accurate” following a “robust process”, until 15 million people screamed it made no sense. Then the student would say it wasn’t his fault because his computer was broken.

In the government’s defence, how could anyone have worked out in advance that marking down students from a school because that school hadn’t achieved such high marks before might be a problem? If a pandemic had happened in Beethoven’s year, he’d have been downgraded from a predicted A to a C because Bonn Comprehensive didn’t have any As the previous year.

If the Premier League hadn’t been completed this year, Liverpool should have been given fourth place, because, in spite of them being 137 points clear at the top, that’s where they normally finish.

This is so efficient, no students need to bother learning anything, they’re just given the grades that school got before, so the schools can be turned into flats.

This should be the rule in every other area as well. So to make the justice system fairer, each town has to send the same number to prison every year. If Luton sent fewer this year than in 2018, the local council takes 40 random people out of Lidl and gives them all six years for armed robbery.

But the way they dealt with these exams seems to fit a pattern. Because this government had the same approach for increasing NHS fees for foreign nurses. A decision the prime minister might as well have responded to by saying: “I am sick and tired of foreigners coming over here and saving my life as a sneaky way of earning money off our health system. If they can’t be bothered to pay for the privilege, they don’t DESERVE to save my life.”

Eventually, someone spotted a flaw in this proposal so they abandoned it, and replaced it by announcing an end to the furlough scheme, because we could no longer afford to let people stay at home and not work, just because they’d been ordered to stay at home and not work.

Boris Johnson was probably about to make a traditional Conservative speech, saying: “If someone has been put out of work because I’ve ordered them to stay at home, they should go and look for work somewhere else. Maybe there’s a job in the toilet, or underneath the settee.”

Instead, they abandoned that and announced instead that all schools would reopen in June, which would also be when the world-beating, game-changing track and trace would be ready, until they abandoned both of those.

So they announced there was no need to wear a face covering, as they made no difference, until they amended that slightly to “Everyone HAS to wear a mask”. Then every minister said something slightly different, such as: “In shops you must wear a mask and play a flute” or “if you have breathing difficulties you must wear one over your arse.”

So these people calling for Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, to resign are being thoroughly unfair. He was simply following the rules of his government, in proposing something mad, sticking to it despite the opposition of everyone, then cancelling it while saying no one could possibly have foreseen the thing that everyone foresaw.

But they seem to get away with it, so they’ll probably carry on like this. Next week they’ll announce prisons will be turned into aquariums, and long-term prisoners have to paint themselves yellow and orange and pretend to be tropical fish.

Then they’ll abandon that, saying no one could have predicted the findings of a report that concluded prisoners don’t have gills.

But never mind, because to save money on expensive training, heart surgeons will be chosen by the National Lottery, though you’ll be restricted to liver transplants if you needed the bonus ball.

To save further public money through efficiency, the library service will be merged with the navy, and the romantic fiction D to H section will be used as an aircraft carrier.

And none of them responsible for these schemes will ever resign. Priti Patel could be filmed making balaclavas out of the Queen’s corgis to sell to the Continuity IRA to raise money for the Campaign to Fill the Sea with Plastic and Particularly Poisonous Whale-Killing Mercury, and she’d say she’d done nothing illegal, and Johnson would say he’d drawn a line under it, and what the British people wanted was to see her get back to being an incompetent psychopath as soon as possible.

In spite of all this, they remain slightly ahead in the polls, as if around 40 per cent of the population has now forgotten there are any other parties. So you might as well ask them which moon they’d prefer to go round the Earth.

We’re now run by a government that’s the equivalent of a car mechanic where, when you take your car for a service, they tell you they’re going to set it alight. You tell them that doesn’t seem right, but they insist this is a well-thought-out policy, it’s even been approved by Chris Grayling, and “we lead the world in repairing things by incinerating them”. Then, one month later, when it’s revealed there are three thousand charred vehicles blocking the entire town, they announce they’re reviewing their policy, but it’s not their fault, no one will resign, and in a poll, 41 per cent say they would still vote for them to carry on “fixing” their vehicles.