If the BTEC farce proves anything, it's that nothing will stop Boris Johnson from enjoying his holiday break

Just hundreds of thousands of people not getting their qualifications at all today then. There’s less of a fuss about it all, of course, because they’re only some obscure thing called BTECs, and no one important in politics really knows what they are.

I’ll fill you in. A BTEC is what you tend to get if you, say, want to work in a care home, and is not to be confused with a PPE degree from Oxford, which is what you’ll need if you want to accidentally flood the entire care home sector with undiagnosed coronavirus. (PPE is also what you’ll need to study if you want to provide the people who work in care homes with a very small badge.)

We are so far into the realm of auto-parody now that can anyone be bothered even to raise an eyebrow to note that Pearson decided, with a few hours notice, that it wasn’t actually going to publish the BTEC results it’s had since March to sort out.

This is the organisation that sets and moderates exams. It’s had several months to prepare, and now, on the morning of the task in question, it’s realised it’s not done anything at all and so it’s just not going to turn up. An actual exam board having an actual exam anxiety dream, except in real life, while wide awake, with hundreds of thousands of people watching.

There’s precious little point in trying to point out who’s to blame for it all, because that person is Gavin Williamson and we already know he’s not going to quit and he’s not going to be sacked. For Boris Johnson to sack him, he’d actually have to break from his holiday for a few minutes and that is far too much trouble. He didn’t break his nine-day Chequers retreat in February to concern himself with some trifling little thing called Covid-19, so he’s hardly going to bother to do so for the sake of sacking Williamson.

And why should he? He doesn’t want to. Johnson owes much to Williamson. Though to the outsider, it is both horrifying and depressing in equal measure to think that Williamson is a significant person in public life, it is sadly true.