Gavin Williamson has found out why summer can be a headache for politicians

If 2020 was another year entirely, by now we might be deep into what newspapers have traditionally described as the “silly season”.

Those couple of weeks, often towards the end of the summer, when many people are on holiday and the news becomes filled with unlikely world records or attempts to save from the chopping board a pair of pigs who have escaped into the English countryside.

As the embattled education secretary Gavin Williamson is discovering, that is not always the case. For it can be much harder during summer for those attempting to move the news agenda on to something, anything, different.

The Damian McBride scandal in 2009 broke at one of the worst possible times if you happened to be Gordon Brown’s special advisor. The story hit the front pages and stayed there as the rest of the country retired for their Easter bank holiday break.

With little else happening it was difficult for Labour to avoid days of headlines and, with it, growing pressure for action. In the end, he resigned.

In truth, the year was always going to be very different. With no end in sight to the coronavirus crisis, there was never likely to be much of a silly season in 2020.

No matter what shapes the news agenda over the next ten days, there is much hard work ahead for the medics and scientists at the front line of the fight against this global pandemic.

Many of them are spending their summer indoors working valiantly to save lives, either by treating patients, writing public health strategies or creating the vaccines we all hope will allow us to enjoy, if that is the right way to put it, a proper silly season this time next year.

Yours,

Kate Devlin

Whitehall editor