I would, right now. I wouldn’t feel that it was a fate that I deserved, not really, but I’d do it anyway. I’d take my cue from the Hugh Abbot character in The Thick of It and argue that it is possible, actually, to have a good resignation.
This would be a good resignation. I’d be doing it now, at a point where it had become obvious that, should I have wished to, I could have clung on. I’d also be able to pin the real blame on my department. I’d do this by pointing out that although I did give the green light to the appointment of sexual deviants as teachers, I was doing so in a titular capacity, not a personal one. I would add that the real blame ought to lie with whoever devised this crazy system whereby I had to say yes or no to anybody. Which wasn’t me. Most likely.
I would thus be resigning in a spirit of ministerial responsibility, which sounds good, especially to a slightly older generation which remembers what the phrase actually means. My resignation would a) give me some time to spend with my many, many children, and b) allow me to bail out of this doomed Government before I end up trashing my career entirely by being the poor schmuck steering the runaway train of Tony Blair’s upcoming and barking education reforms. By the time I returned, everybody would consider me refreshed and unsullied, and I’d be laughing.
Of course, if I were Ruth Kelly, I probably wouldn’t have seen The Thick of It, and I certainly wouldn’t be using it as the bedrock of my understanding of British politics. I’d also probably think that Blair’s barking education reforms were a good thing. So while there are doubtless other factors at play here, that’s probably why I’m not resigning.