Their toxic antics at the Department for Education disguised policies that were wilfully careless with children’s futures

Once upon a time there was a Twitter account called @toryeducation. Now extinct for reasons that will become clear, it was in its day an aggressive player in the education policy debate raging around the former education secretary Michael Gove.

Widely believed to have been fuelled by Gove’s special advisers, it typified the modus operandi of the Department for Education at the time. The education secretary could be erudite and charming in person but his social media and off-the-record operations were pugilistic and at times personally abusive.