Ah, the beloved ministerial gag. Loved and loathed in equal measure. A tool speechwriters employ to inject a semblance of humanity into their bosses' prose.
They are designed to: 1) be mostly inoffensive, 2) induce polite/nervous laughter and 3) be instantly forgettable.
One such utterance came from the education secretary Damian Hinds last week, in his flagship speech on technical education reform.
Razor-sharp wit?
This throwaway joke highlighted the issue of matching skills with the labour market need.
“We know, for example,” Mr Hinds began, limbering up to drop this belter, “that Germany trains around 11,000 hairdressers per year.
"In England, around 40,000 people train in hairdressing each year [PAUSE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT] in a country with fewer actual heads.”
Right on cue, the room quivered with courteous laughter at the minister’s razor-sharp wit before he launched into praising T levels, the government’s Industrial Strategy and Battersea Power Station. And so the joke was forgotten.
A curious document
Or was it?
Barely an hour after Mr Hinds had finished his speech, a curious document called landed in FErret’s email inbox from the Department for Education.
The subject line read: “International comparison of courses in hairdressing and barbering”.
Upon further inspection, this “ad-hoc notice” was a six-page document, complete with research methodology, blatantly put together by a poor civil servant in Sanctuary Buildings with the sole intention of justifying a minister’s joke.
Cutting-edge research
The aim of the cutting-edge research was clearly stated in the document: “The purpose of the analysis is to describe the number of people who start hairdressing training courses in England and Germany”.
What’s that old saying? If you have to explain a joke then it isn’t funny...
In fact, the joke is on Mr Hinds as Germany is actually facing a shortage of hairdressers, as research published last month by government-owned development bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfP) shows.
FErret wonders how much this DfE-produced research cost to produce. He hopes it was a snip.
