Tolley stays on message to blunt Labour attack

Anne Tolley. Photo / Mark Mitchell

When Parliament suddenly goes pin-droppingly silent - as it did yesterday - it is a fair bet someone is in serious strife or at least teetering on the brink of it.

Such a funereal hush enveloped the chamber during ministers' question time as MPs cut the chatter, put down their papers and documents and sat and watched what they would have expected to be yet another excruciating, yet totally captivating instalment in Trevor Mallard's slow excoriation of Education Minister Anne Tolley.

The Labour MP's tormenting of Tolley over the implementation of the Government's policy on national standards for literacy and numeracy has become almost a daily ritual when Parliament is sitting.

It turns parliamentary politics into the survival of the fittest, which has someone displaying the slightest hint of weakness or vulnerability being savaged. Well, not quite. Mallard knows he is in danger of being painted as a bully and has accordingly adopted a more forensic approach to his questioning.

Yesterday's use of the stiletto instead of the sledgehammer proved to be even more deadly, however. Within minutes of the latest round of Tolley-baiting ending, Mallard was claiming victory on the Labour MPs' Red Alert website.

Under the heading of "Tolley has another shocker", Mallard wrote that he did not know whether to "laugh or cry" over her failure to remember the briefing paper she had received on becoming a Cabinet minister.

Mallard was justified in claiming a victory - but only on points. This time there was applause from Tolley's own side of the House as the Education Minister managed to keep her poise - if only just.

Yesterday's inquisition centred on whether Tolley remembered getting a briefing on the extremely positive results achieved by the last Government's literacy programme.

Tolley paused before responding, her mind no doubt going ninety-to-the-dozen as she tried to anticipate whatever trap Mallard was almost certainly setting for her.

It was lose-lose whatever she said. If she did not remember, she would be slammed as lacking the necessary basics required of a minister. If she did remember, Mallard would then probe her on the detail. Worse, he might then reveal there had been no such document.

Indeed, there was a trap. The information was on page 18 of the Ministry of Education's 60-page post-election briefing paper to the incoming minister - a document with which a new minister would be expected to have more than a passing acquaintance.

Whether she should have been able to recollect that schools using Labour's Literacy Strategy had achieved gains in reading and writing which were twice those which could otherwise be expected is very much a moot point, however - especially given the countless briefings and reports she would have been given in the 16 months since.

What was different this time was that Tolley remembered to pick a line and keep repeating it ad nauseam - that whatever briefings or reports she might or might not have received on Labour's programme, nearly one in five pupils were leaving school unable to read, write or do maths at anywhere near the levels they needed to in order to succeed in life. And her colleagues weighed in behind her.

They knew they were not witnessing the greatest performance by a minister trying to counter an Opposition MP. But it was a marked improvement on the slaughter they had witnessed in the weeks before.