The Tory government’s bungling of A-level and GCSE exam results this year has had a devastating impact on young people this year. It has destroyed young peoples’ confidence, ruined chances for many to get the university places they want, and will have ripples impacting on next year’s cohort who will be competing for oversubscribed courses with those from this year who have been forced to defer.

There have been multiple column inches devoted to the impact of the way the Tories have handled this crisis and it isn’t worth me adding to them. What I want to pick-up on is the lengths the government will go to in order to avoid responsibility.

I want to look beyond the forcing out of unelected officials, Jonathan Slater from the Department of Education and Sally Collier from Ofqual, in order to save the skin of Gavin Williamson. Instead, I want to look at how the Boris Johnson is using language to put a subtle distance between him, his government and the decisions that led to the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people being negatively affected.

In a much reported speech, Johnson neither accepted nor denied responsibility, and instead talked about a ‘mutant algorithm’.

“I am afraid your grades were almost derailed by a mutant algorithm and I know how stressful that must have been” 

This is a clever and subtle use of language. The use of the word mutant does two very important things for Johnson.

First, it implies that the algorithm is in someway natural and outside the control of any human agency. In doing so it removes any possibility that Johnson and the Tory Cabinet could in anyway be responsible for creating it.

Second, it implies that everything would have been ok if something, again outside the control of Johnson and the Tories, hadn’t mutated.

But algorithms are not natural. They are entirely created by people, at the direction of other people. In this case, of Tory ministers entirely focused on grade inflation and incapable of imagining, let alone caring, about the impact of their decisions on young people from poorer backgrounds.

Johnson is extremely adept at using eye-catching language that will be widely reported. By ensuring that what he says, and how he says it, is what is covered, he subtly shifts the frame of the debate. He shifts it away from where it should be; the failures of his government, his education minister and himself. We need to stop letting him get away with this, we need to see through his language, stop using it and keep the focus on his incompetence.