Bridget Phillipson is bad enough when snarling class war at Middle England. She’s even more unsettling when she tries to exude sweet positivity.

Scary Bridget came to the Commons to present her expensive, complicated reforms to the mad world of special needs teaching.

Beforehand she licked the inside of her upper lip, as boxers do before a fight. At the despatch box her mouth muscles did more pushing and pumping. Then a terrifying thing happened: Ms Phillipson cracked a hesitant, unfamiliar smile.

Bats fled. Distant werewolves yowled. Not since Margaret Beckett started singing a folk ballad at a charity concert 20 years ago has something so disconcerting occurred. Scary Bridget was smiling! It was like seeing a moose in the last furlong of the Grand National.

Education Secretary Ms Phillipson could not resist completely casting some bile at the Tories and private schools. She spat out a phrase about how ‘class and connections’ should not matter. Independent schools that accepted special needs pupils were ‘sucking money out of our education system into profit’.

Having unburdened herself of those grudges she caught a grip of herself and adopted, instead, a floaty tone to describe an educational utopia in which every child in Britain would attend an ‘excellent local school’. 

She envisaged a land where special needs experts would be on hand in every classroom, where parents would never need do battle with authority. ‘Achieve!’ she cooed. ‘Thrive!’ All this was going to happen in, cough, a decade’s time.

There was some basic electoral grooming of the teacher vote. Their maternity pay would be boosted. Suddenly there was four billion quid more in the kitty. Ms Phillipson intended to ‘shape the society of tomorrow’ and halve ‘the disadvantage gap’. She continued: ‘No school is an island. School days will be energised. We will fix the special needs system once and for all.’ And our parliamentary representatives believed her.

Bridget Phillipson could not resist casting some bile at the Tories and private schools, as she presented her expensive reforms to special needs teaching, says our columnist

The only dissenting voice was Reform’s Suella Braverman who complained that the claimed improvements were planned years in the future rather than now. The Commons, shocked by Suella’s scepticism, tsssked and tutted.

Saint Bridget, still baring her gnashers in that unfamiliar manner – it was like seeing a woman checking her teeth for post-prandial spinach – fluted on about ‘a new national experts talent initiative’, a ‘national conversation’, ‘a smooth transition from 2030’. We heard about the ‘reasonable adjustment framework’, various ‘missions’, ‘embedding of expectations and inclusivity’ and endless new training and administrative palaver.

Will teachers really want this? My daughter-in-law recently taught at an academy school in Cheltenham. She quit because she had to devise six different lesson plans for every class, so crazy had special needs rules become. She and my son have emigrated to communist China, where the system feels freer.

And yet Labour MPs were in clover. They leaned back on the benches and gazed creamily at the ceiling. Here was a minister talking about spending ever more money, creating new centralised requirements, imposing embuggerances, funding new tiers of managers.

While most MPs seemed supportive of the Education Secretary, Reform’s Suella Braverman was a lone dissenting voice

A more persuasive snapshot of political reality came earlier when Sir Keir Starmer’s poor trouble-shooter, Darren Jones, had to explain about an ethics probe into Josh Simons, who is minister for, er, public sector ethics. He used to run a dodgy outfit, Labour Together, which smeared newspaper journalists. It was unusually generous to numerous Starmerite ministers.

One of these was Mr Jones himself. Jonesy became v. huffy when accused of pocketing Labour Together cash. ‘Not. A. Penny.’ he said primly. Turned out he had merely accepted 60 grand’s worth of free staff. Peanuts, m’dears.

Leftwing Labour backbenchers let rip. They really hate the Starmer lot and still have it in for Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s ex chief-poisoner. His wife, a Labour Whip, was present throughout.

Brian Leishman (Lab, Alloa) said a rude word which had to be withdrawn. Andy McDonald (Lab, Middlesbrough) thought the Simons affair ‘truly sordid’. Rebecca Long-Bailey (Lab, Salford) compared Britain to a Press-hating dictatorship. The Left won’t stop until Starmer is toast.