Dear the parents/guardians of Andrea Jenkyns (age 49 years and 5 months),
I am concerned that Andrea’s most recent piece – her no-confidence letter to the Prime Minister – does not reflect her true abilities, and given her experience as both Secretary of State for Skills and Secretary of State for Education, I suspect Andrea may not be trying her best here.
Andrea’s letter starts well: I enjoyed her use of repetition in the short simple sentence, ‘Enough is enough.’ However, I’m afraid this is not enough in itself. In the next sentence she writes, ‘we have a party leader that’ when it really should be ‘we have a party leader who‘ (Andrea has always had problems with pronouns), and the repetition of ‘party’ and ‘reject’ is perhaps unnecessary (and not, perhaps, what she wants the reader to focus on in these turbulent times).
The sentence makes no sense
In her second paragraph I appreciate that she is trying hard in her vocabulary with ‘Machiavellian’, but the problem is that she has focused so much on this that she has forgotten to put a verb in the main clause. Therefore, the sentence makes no sense.
She then writes that ‘Boris, the man who won the Conservative Party a massive majority, was unforgivable enough.’ I think she means ‘Sacking Boris, the man who won the Conservative Party a massive majority, was unforgivable enough.’ I don’t think this irony is deliberate, and may be confusing for her audience.
The next sentence also unfortunately doesn’t make sense (this time there is no subject), and she should know about not starting sentences with the coordinating conjunction ‘but’. Perhaps instead she should use a discourse marker like ‘on the other hand’ or ‘conversely’. I think she may have missed this lesson as she was being made a dame, but we had all assumed she meant she was going to a pantomime.
Then there is the use of inappropriate imagery of Suella Braverman having the ‘balls to speak the truth’. I understand that Andrea wants to stick up for her friend, but this colloquialism is simply too informal for this kind of letter.
There is more: the misuse of the semicolon; forgetting to put the article ‘the’ before ‘Jewish community’; the mixed metaphors (I liked ‘barnstorming’ but it doesn’t really work alongside ‘set out our stall’); the use of ‘MP’s’ rather than MPs (remember apostrophes are for possession, Andrea!); the mistake in ‘let he‘ rather than ‘let him‘; plus the lack of subject and verb in the sentence starting ‘To be 20 points behind…’ This is all really a question of proofreading, and next time I would advise Andrea to remember the acronym we teach in class of TAP: tone, audience, purpose, not take away punctuation.
There are some positives: the final two paragraphs of her letter do have some interesting ideas. She includes some economic policies as well as social ones, and I was particularly pleased with her repetition of the modal verb ‘must’, which gives her concluding remarks a rather emphatic tone. However, at Westminster Commons School we pride ourselves on excellence, and her constant comma splicing is simply unacceptable. There are four commas in her last sentence, and she has used three of them incorrectly.
Our strong and stable Senior Leadership Team constantly reminds the pupils that they should be role models in all aspects of life, and I am afraid this letter, which she made public before having someone proofread it properly, has brought the school into disrepute. The school is desperately trying to disperse rumours that we prioritise STEM subjects over the arts, and Andrea’s low level of literacy is hardly helping our cause. This is almost as disgraceful as when Boris Johnson, our former Head Boy, who was expelled after partying on school grounds, ruined his apology speech by saying, ‘Them’s the breaks.’
Andrea must learn to write properly and apply herself if she wants to be taken seriously in her future career. Quite frankly, I think she has let herself, her peers, and her readers down, and I hope in future she remembers that politicians should be able to write as well as Year 7 pupils.
Ms Murkett
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