THE government is trying to sound consensual about the coronavirus crisis in public, while sending its outriders off to shout paranoid rants in an effort to rally the troops and pressure the opposition.

Boris Johnson and friends are clearly very nervous that they will get the blame for failure to control the epidemic, or for the financial fall that might follow.

They are treading softly in person, while putting their pals out for the angrier, crazier attacks on the side.

When I say paranoid rants, I am not being hyperbolic for effect. This was the opening sentence in a major article in the last Mail on Sunday: “Ministers believe ‘The Blob’ — an army made up of political opponents and union barons — is colluding to politicise the coronavirus outbreak, the Mail on Sunday has learned.”

Government ministers want to get schools open earlier, but don’t want to directly confront unions, because they think parents trust teachers more than them.

So they’ve briefed the Mail to try and play hard cop to their soft cop. Only it really reads like mad cop rather than hard cop.

A “Blob Army” ? it sounds like something from the government’s subconscious.

The article claims that “Michael Gove coined the term ‘The Blob’ to deride bureaucrats, academics and teachers’ unions determined to thwart his efforts to reform state schools when he was education secretary from 2010 to 2014.”

And that “the term harked back to a 1950s sci-fi film called The Blob about an alien life-form that engulfs everything in its path.”

So the government believes teachers are like a powerful alien creature?

The Blob is an excellent 1950s science-fiction B-movie, with crude but effective special effects. It’s full of cold war paranoia — “Run from the Blob! It eats you alive.”

A minister thinking teachers are a terrifying extraterrestrial ooze seems like the kind of persecution delusion that happens shortly before the minister is ordered to take a month off to “rest” due to “overwork.”

It’s actually worse than this. As is so often the case, the Mail is wrong. Gove did not coin the term “The Blob.”

Gove only started talking about “The Blob” in the Mail in 2013. Like the original science-fiction film, his vision of “the Blob” had plenty of cold-war-style hysteria — he said that both the staff rooms and teacher training departments of universities were full of “Marxist ideas” and “’60s values.”

Gove said that “school reformers in the past often complained about what was called ‘The Blob’,” the hidden Marxist alliance of teacher training, unions and radical teachers.

But the “school reformer” who influenced Gove by first using the “Blob” word in this way was US conservative William J Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s education secretary from 1985-8.

He wanted to stuff US schools full of endless tests, reduce the curriculum to mechanistic “facts,” introduce new private schools providers, cut teachers’ salaries and reduce their professional skills.

Unsurprisingly, he met opposition from teachers, local education authorities and university teacher training academics — so more or less everyone delivering education. Or “The Blob” as he saw it.

Bennett wasn’t dissolved by “The Blob” from another planet, like the victims in the movie, but he did have meet a horrible end.

First, he went to work for a private education firm called K12. It sold online schools technology, making profit by replacing “bricks-and-mortar” schools with “virtual” education.

However, investigations by the New York Times and Washington Post found his firm squeezing profits from public school funding by raising enrolment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.

His “cyber-schools” were found to be failing. Bennett didn’t stay with K12 — he had to resign after claiming on his radio show that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

So when Gove and co start talking about “The Blob” in education, understand they mean that they are following a racist Reaganite who wanted to make profit selling technologically glossy but substandard kit to schools.

Gove particularly wanted to go to war with “The Blob” to shift teacher training out of universities and into a school-based programme: the standard teacher training model for secondary school is a one-year postgraduate qualification based in a university, with practical placements in schools.

Gove thought this was transmitting the virus of “Marxist ’60s values” to teachers. Typically of Gove, this wild rhetorical flourish was matched with failure and incompetence.

He set up a new scheme called Schools Direct to replace teacher training. It has not worked: for every year since his 2013 reform, the government has missed its target for recruiting teachers.

The latest figures, for 2019, show secondary school teacher training recruitment is 15 per cent below target.

The university teacher training institutions Gove doesn’t like are still training nearly half of all secondary school teachers.

If Gove’s plan to get rid of them was more successful, we would be facing even greater teacher shortages.

So the government wants to go to war with the education “Blob” again, when the last time it did, over teacher training, its “reform” failed and led to teacher shortages.

Right now, our half-cocked government ministers are only getting their pals to do their half-crazed lashing out for them, like a ventriloquist with a dummy.

Ministers themselves are trying to do “serious” and “concern” on the podium.

But their laissez-faire attitude, their belief the state should do as little as possible, their enthusiasm for a bit of “creative disruption” is running into deep problems when dealing with infection — the virus isn’t interested in Adam Smith or Friedrich von Hayek. It will only respond to strong collective public health measures.

When things get worse — and I fear they will — the ventriloquists might drop the dummies and start ranting themselves.