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The U-turn, when it came, was sealed just before 10am, minutes before the weekly cabinet meeting in Downing Street.
Boris Johnson told education secretary Gavin Wiliamson and chancellor Rishi Sunak that he had decided free school meals should indeed be extended over the summer holiday.
It didn’t take long for the £120m in extra funding to be agreed, as the Department for Education and the Treasury had already costed the six weeks of extra help for England’s 1.3m children eligible for the £15-a-week vouchers. All that was needed was for the PM himself to make the final call.
But what was really needed, in the final analysis, was Marcus Rashford. The 22-year-old footballer’s powerful campaign had finally grabbed Johnson’s full attention on Tuesday morning, when he was shown the
BBC Breakfast interview with the
England star from the day before. Featuring Rashford’s own personal story of being on free school meals, while his single mum went out to work, the clip had gone viral online.
The interview itself was testimony to BBC Breakfast’s recent shift to campaigning journalism, a drive led by new editor Richard Frediani. The programme had also been the first to tell Colonel Tom Moore’s extraordinary story and used the power and reach of the BBC’s schedules to push it as his fundraising snowballed. With clips rapidly shared to other broadcasters, the Rashford interview was striking a similar chord with the public.
Just as importantly, Tory MPs had seized on the interview, as well as a Times article penned by Rashford on Tuesday morning, and his own heartfelt, open letter to all MPs. The footballer has 8.4m followers on
Instagram, but more importantly when it comes to politics, 2.8m followers on Twitter: the social medium of choice for Westminster and the mainstream media. His open letter had had an enormous impact, with 156,000 retweets.
The PM’s media team had on Monday grasped the growing power of Rashford campaign’s direct appeal to MPs, with his official spokesman issuing what turned out to be a holding statement. He stressed that Johnson would “respond to Marcus Rashford’s letter as soon as he can”, and No.10 praised him for using his profile “in a positive way to highlight some very important issues”.
When the prime minister said at his press conference on Tuesday evening that it was a campaign “to be honest I only became aware of very recently – today”, he was referring to the BBC Breakfast interview, insiders said. Johnson had been aware of Rashford campaign more generally, but it was the interview that clinched the decision.
There was, however, some raw politics in play too. On Monday night, only a handful of Tory MPs were threatening to do the unthinkable and vote for a
Labour Opposition day motion calling for the U-turn. Among them were two former ministers well liked on the backbenches, Tracey Crouch and Rob Halfon. Halfon had had to break the news to his whip that he would be using his first ever proxy vote under
Coronavirus regulations to vote against his own party.
But by Tuesday morning, the handful had swelled into dozens, making it a real possibility that the government could actually lose, despite its 80-strong majority. Tory MP’s
WhatsApp groups, notably the One Nation Caucus but also the backbench 1922 Committee group, were set alight with messages about the growing rebellion. Newer MPs from the ‘Red Wall’ shared their unease too, and plenty of backbenchers said their inboxes were heaving with a public agreeing with Rashford.
“I was getting messages by the bucketload from the public. And it wasn’t the usual leftwingers, it was people I knew were not normally political,” one backbencher said. “The idea of us denying free school meals to those in need, it felt like a poll tax moment in the making.” Williamson, a former chief whip, was also picking up real discontent among MPs.Another Tory MP added: “The whips could tell this was going to be a huge headache. You never, ever vote for an Opposition Day motion, precisely because it’s technically meaningless so why would you get into trouble for that? But that just proved how big this was, that so many were prepared to do it. There was nothing in that motion that you could disagree with.”
Work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey inadvertently helped fuel the rebellion when she gave a misjudged response to Rashford’s tweets about the hardships faced by families struggling in the pandemic. Correcting the footballer for saying poor people’s water supplies could be cut off, without addressing his wider point, her stance was met with incredulity among some fellow MPs. Just after the U-turn had been made in private, Coffey’s public tweets then had a marked shift in tone, welcoming Rashford’s ‘passion’ for supporting children in need.
The row was the talk of the Commons tea room too, with Tories confiding in each other and wondering whether the PM’s response to Rashford would include a concession. Government whips felt they could contain the rebellion, but the numbers were getting very worrying. “I would give the Chief Whip [Mark Spencer] a lot of credit for this,” one MP said. “He worked extremely hard to feed back views of the flock.”
When the Cabinet meeting was held, the only two ministers physically present with Johnson around the Cabinet table were Spencer and Sunak. With others dialling in via Zoom call, the PM proceeded to break the news of the change in policy, singling out for praise Rashford’s contribution to the debate.
The
Manchester United star’s weeks of commitment to the cause had been particularly important, as he had personally injected his own money to help the food waste charity FareShare to hit a target of £20m. Just as crucial however was his overall tone. “He made clear this was not about politics, it was about children and hunger. That was what was decisive”, one insider said.
“He played a blinder,” one MP said. “It took this charismatic young man to make everyone see what was before their eyes.” Another added that the context of the Black Lives Matter
protests (a disproportionate number of black children are on free meals) was important too. “Here was a young black man showing leadership some of us can only dream of,” they said.
The actual roots of the change stretched back to Williamson’s own decision in April to extend the school voucher scheme to cover the Easter holiday. He told
Friends at the time that because the precedent had been set for the first time to cover days outside term time, it would be very difficult to avoid a similar move in the summer. A further short extension for the late May half term only added to his case.The Treasury was not so easily moved. Sunak made clear to his colleagues that it was time to get back to more traditional Tory fiscal responsibility with taxpayers’ money. “He was already worried about the dependency of the furlough scheme and didn’t want more people getting into dependency,” one source said. “He wanted a move back to normality, not another new precedent being set.”
That Treasury opposition was the main reason Johnson could only produce £63 ahead of last week’s prime minister’s question time, in answer to Keir Starmer’s own call for a summer extension.
Even the £63m proved a difficult sell to some backbenchers, who pointed out it would cover all ages, not just children, and was not a real substitute for school meal vouchers. Newly-elected Tory MP for Stockton South Matt Vickers had already seen his local council denied access to a smaller £9m holiday activities fund, and word was filtering out that a PR nightmare was looming.
Ultimately, it ended up as a decision for Johnson himself and as First Lord of the Treasury, only he could make the final call. After his own statement to the Commons on merging DfID with the Foreign Office, Johnson got back to his Downing Street office around 4pm and then phoned Rashford directly. He thanked him for his £20m in fundraising and for the way he had raised the whole issue of free school meals.
Rashford’s own reaction to the U-turn was as pitch perfect as ever, tweeting “THIS is England, in 2020”. Later he stressed to MPs “this was never about me or you, this was never about politics, this was a cry out for help from vulnerable parents all over the country”. But like all good campaigners, he left open the possibility he would be back. And his warning - “there is still a long way to go” on child poverty - proved he’s ready to go to extra time, any time.Related... Boris Johnson U-Turns On Free School Meals And Extends Scheme Into Summer Opinion: A Generation Of Children Are Relying On Boris Johnson To Stop Them From Going Hungry Marcus Rashford Calls On MPs To 'Find Your Humanity' Over Free School Meals