TEACHERS’ determination to secure a proper pay rise will only be strengthened by evidence of ministers’ contempt for them.

Gavin Williamson’s plea that he was talking about unions rather than teachers when he texted then health secretary Matt Hancock that they “really really do just hate work” — the context being teachers’ concerns over safe school reopening at the height of the pandemic — is bound to fall flat. 

As National Education Union joint general secretary Kevin Courtney quotes striking teachers in Chichester: “We are the union”. 

The insinuation that unions are somehow forcing workers to strike is especially feeble given the high strike ballot thresholds the likes of the NEU have smashed through — and the fact that 50,000 teachers have joined the union since the result was announced.

Teachers can take courage too from new polling showing support for their action is highest among parents — those whose working lives and children’s education are inevitably disrupted. 

Their experience of an underfunded, understaffed education system leads them to side with teachers trying to fix it. Here are the building blocks of a powerful popular coalition for change.

Williamson would rather not have to justify himself. His words have been revealed by the Telegraph’s publication of WhatsApp messages leaked to it by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who accessed them while ghostwriting Hancock’s self-serving pandemic memoir.

Trusting Oakeshott, whose previous disclosures landed former energy secretary Chris Huhne and his wife in prison, was an act in keeping with the moronic character who emerges from Hancock’s leaked texts.

Her claim to have broken a non-disclosure agreement purely on public interest grounds may not convince — we do not know how much the Telegraph has paid her — but there is undoubtedly a public interest in seeing ministers’ exchanges during Covid.

That said, if Oakeshott has a motive other than financial gain it is a political one that her chosen conduit, the Telegraph, shares — and Hancock is undoubtedly right that the latter’s decisions on what messages to publish and how to frame them will reflect its political agenda.

A core part of this is to smear public servants and their unions as lazy and irresponsible for raising concerns about the safety of their workplaces during Covid. 

The messages about teachers “hating work” came during the 2020-21 Christmas break, when teachers forced Boris Johnson into a humiliating U-turn in closing school premises on the first day of the spring term after the NEU advised its members to inform their head teachers it was unsafe for them to attend work “in crowded buildings with no social distancing, no PPE and inadequate ventilation”.

The union had, in fact, made multiple proposals to government on how in-person teaching could be done safely, including by requisitioning unused buildings and launching a recruitment drive among teachers who had left the profession to facilitate smaller class sizes.

Ministers ignored them all. Pupils’ learning was a lower priority than upholding property rights, and the risk that parents might come to appreciate and expect smaller classes and more one-on-one teacher time could not be countenanced.

That motive — to ensure existing social and economic relations remain untouched whatever crises buffet them — is at the heart of the Telegraph’s game plan. Unions’ role in the pandemic must be rubbished because unions must not be seen — as they increasingly are — as the force which will resolve the current cost-of-living crisis in ordinary people’s favour.

The real reasons Britain’s Covid death toll was proportionally among the highest worldwide lie in the state of the country the pandemic hit — the run-down, understaffed NHS, outsourcing of core services to cost-cutting chancers, the insecure, impoverished workforce.

Assessing the impact of decisions made during Covid is necessary, but a row over ministerial spats cannot substitute for addressing those underlying problems if we are to avoid such catastrophic loss of life in the future.