arcus Rashford is 22 years old and the reason desperate families will now continue to receive free school meal vouchers during the holidays. During lockdown, this prodigiously talented campaigner has started a charity that has raised millions to feed 400,000 children, partnered on a drive to counter homelessness and now wants to stop 1.3m British children going hungry this summer. Any other CV points – minor interests, hobbies, stuff like that? Ah yes, hang on: he also plays as a forward for Manchester United and England. Today, in a powerful plea that has succeeded in forcing a government U-turn - Rashford wrote: “I don’t claim to have the education of an MP in parliament, but I do have a social education.” And we’ll come to Gavin Williamson, the 43-year-old secretary of state for education, in due course. Suffice to say Gavin has gone so missing in the biggest game of his career that the coastguard has called off the search and it has now become a matter for the Hubble telescope. As for the prime minister … shortly before Marcus Rashford was born to a single mother who he idolises for her tireless work and sacrifices, Boris Johnson was writing that single mothers were producing a generation of “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children”. Which, let’s face it, means so much more coming from him. For now, a reminder of where we were two-and-a-half months ago. Taking the podium at a government press conference, even as Covid-19 was ripping silently through the care homes he’d later lie he’d put a “ring of steel” around, Gavin’s cabinet colleague Matt Hancock was very keen to show he had his priorities in order. “I think the first thing that Premier League footballers can do is make a contribution,” Matt proclaimed. “Take a pay cut and play their part.” Well there you go. It must have seemed such an easy win, for politicians who know nothing about footballers, or indeed about football. Or, increasingly, about winning. Just a reminder of where the “world-beating” UK currently is: we have the third highest death toll in the world, the OECD has predicted we will have the worst-hit economy in the developed world, and we are on course for one of the slowest and most socially painful exits from lockdown. If this is world-beating I’d hate to see us lose. I don’t need to tell you that during this entire shitshow, under their exclusive management, the government has only suggested a single group in our society should take a pay cut: Premier League footballers. To dispense with the more irrelevant end of the housekeeping first: Premier League players were going to take a pay cut anyway when Matt was going for his headline; they announced the 30% reduction within hours; and have since contributed in a vast and mostly unpublicised number of ways to social and charitable initiatives within their communities and beyond. But even if they had done absolutely none of that – genuinely unthinkable – imagine Matt Hancock, secretary of state for health in a time of pandemic, spending even one minute having a view on what footballers were doing. Because that actually happened. I know the buzzphrase is “easy to say in hindsight” – but on the basis that I wrote about it at the time, I’m going to have to go with “easy to say in sight”. This is not a matter of retrospect – it was always a matter of spect. As is the observation that what is happening right now to children – most particularly the vulnerable, but far beyond too – will be a disgraceful stain on this government. Schoolchildren in this country are in crisis. A fifth have done little or no schoolwork at home, with four in ten having no regular contact with teachers. When Tory MPs are being besieged by constituents asking them where on earth the Nightingale-style plans for schools are, let alone the Nightingale schools themselves, then something has gone catastrophically wrong, for which Gavin Williamson at the very least should be taking a 100% pay cut. Why has the government failed children so incredibly badly, in ways that will damage many of them for ever? Did they think people wouldn’t notice? The negligence is so enormous that it demands several interlinked theories. For what minuscule amount it’s worth, I have one for the set. The men – and it is almost exclusively men – who have stood behind Downing Street podiums for months telling us what a great job they’re doing have a somewhat unreal understanding of what has been happening in the domestic sphere since lockdown, because this has never been how they themselves have lived. My suspicion is they have wives who have done huge and disproportionate amounts of home and childrearing work for them, while they have climbed the greasy pole. This has insulated them from the realities of how others live, and consequently from forming anything like an informed appreciation of how they might currently be living under the privations of lockdown. What ends as the failure of a generation of children began simply as a failure of imagination. That would certainly fit with the Sunday that Dominic Cummings spent in No 10 not getting sacked. Then, you might recall, he contrived to persuade Boris Johnson and Michael Gove that driving to Durham was a rational and normal response to maybe having to do some childcare while ill. On the one hand, Johnson’s government would have attempted to keep Cummings if he’d explained he’d driven to Durham in order to carry out a series of ritualistic sex murders. On the other, he had perhaps found two perfect individuals to sell this particular bridge to. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have the air of guys who would genuinely think driving hundreds of miles in high lockdown was reasonable on the basis of something they would regard as a unique situation. Seriously, what else could Dom do? Certainly not his own childcare, like other human earthling parents. At the end of the day, to fall back on a football commentary staple, it’s guys like this who have failed schoolchildren and vulnerable children. The lives other families have been forced to lead during lockdown haven’t felt in their purview, even when – in the case of Williamson – it is literally their official purview. So we are left with a 22-year-old footballer having to point out the realities to men whose job it is supposed to be to know. The one thing people love to say about footballers is how many nurses’ salaries their contracts could pay for. Oddly, nurses and footballers seem to be the only two currencies traded on this exchange – which must be to the great satisfaction of politicians. And yet, purely in terms of moral worth and strategic competence, how many Gavin Williamsons would you have to amass before you were even close to the value of one Marcus Rashford? How many Matt Hancocks? How many Boris Johnsons? Perhaps it’s time to move the goalposts and ask those questions instead.