Sarah Vine Child Hygiene Hypocrisy

While some papers have finally admitted that the Government’s push to get schools to reopen by the beginning of next month may be in trouble, the thought has not been allowed to enter by the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker, with today’s Daily Mail going full retro Dacre mode and thundering “CALLOUS TEACHER UNION’S PLOTTING EXPOSED”. There have been “Slurs about ‘mucky’ children”!

And one of those inmates taking an especially principled stand against all those Rotten Lefties™ is the Lady Macbeth-like figure of Sarah “Vain” Vine, which is the most fortunate of coincidences, given she is married to the politician at the forefront of cajoling teachers and their Trades Unions back into the classroom, Michael “Oiky” Gove.

Observing that “Mary Bousted, the [National Education Union’s] joint general secretary, was even shown accusing children of being ‘mucky’, spreading germs and ‘wiping their snot on your trousers and on your dress’”, she sniffed “This is what the woman in charge of our teaching unions thinks of kids. Great”. Then she became yet more unhappy.

Noting that Kevin Courtney, the NEU’s other joint general secretary, had proposed using social media to name those schools that they considered were endangering teacher and/or pupil safety as a way of stopping short of industrial action, she sneered “This is what the teaching unions have in store for heads who don’t obey their dogma. Bullying and online trolling”. The lack of self-awareness is staggering, especially for a Mail pundit.

This is, after all, the paper with a decades-old history of bullying its targets, and an equivalent history of bullying and threatening its own staff. The Mail’s former editor, the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre, was called The Vagina Monologue because of his liberal use of the C-Word. His rants during tours of the newsroom became known as “drive-by shoutings”. Staff were not “double counted”. But it sounded a bit like that.

Worse, when it comes to children’s personal hygiene, it seems Ms Vine has forgotten a column she wrote for the Mail just three months ago, where she bemoaned the state of her daughter’s room: “there are wild boar in the forests of Germany that are tidier than her. Mange-ridden alley cats that are more house-proud. Swamp-dwelling warthogs that are less likely to lay waste to a set of freshly laundered sheets”.

Her daughter Beatrice is described as “pathologically messy”. Worse, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog recently scoured her daughter’s TikTok account to find her “boasting of her love of cannabis weed; smoking a blunt with a friend out of her bedroom window and accidentally calling her dealer ‘daddy’”. And all of that in the household of a Minister of the Crown, and a Daily Mail columnist.

So Sarah Vine has seen the teaching unions describing children as “mucky”, followed that with her graphic description of her now nearly 17-year-old daughter being just that, and inadvertently raised them the routine use of currently illegal drugs.

Ms Vine should remember the words attributed to Denis Thatcher: “better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”.

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