What planet is Gillian Keegan on?

Apparently, the Clapham alkali attack had nothing to do with the asylum system. That is the scorching hot take from Tory education secretary Gillian Keegan.

At the weekend, Sky News’ Trevor Phillips grilled Keegan about why Abdul Ezedi, the suspected attacker, was granted asylum on his third attempt, despite his previous conviction for sexual assault. ‘This is not really about asylum’, Keegan said in response. ‘This is about… the attack on a mother and her children.’ The exchange is painful to watch.

‘How is it possible, that someone turned down twice for asylum, who then commits more than one sexual offence, is granted refugee status?’

‘This is not really about asylum’ says Education Secretary @GillianKeegan. #TrevorPhillips https://t.co/fhIHlpTGAF pic.twitter.com/QCVsKcnkCa

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 4, 2024

Phillips rightly pushed back, making the obvious point that the mother and child would not have been attacked, and would not have sustained life-changing injuries, had Ezedi not been granted asylum in the first place.

Keegan, apparently struggling to grasp the connection between these two events, said that she is more concerned about the injured victims than about how Ezedi was able to carry out the attack.

Of course, those two things are not mutually exclusive. If anything, getting to the bottom of this case and fixing the UK’s asylum system could prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future. After all, Ezedi is not the first dangerous person to have been granted asylum by our clearly dysfunctional system. And he certainly won’t be the last if ministers refuse to admit there is a problem.

So what exactly is stopping Keegan from connecting the dots? Why is she so reluctant to look this problem in the eye? Tellingly, she is not alone here. Fellow Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, when quizzed about the attack on Newsnight last week, said it would be wrong to comment on Ezedi’s asylum status. Instead, she held forth on sexist ‘microaggressions’.

Keegan and Nokes belong to a surprisingly influential sect of Tories who have drunk the woke Kool-Aid on a range of issues. Keegan has also gone all in for trans ideology. She claims that ‘transwomen are women’ and believes that 16-year-olds should be able to ‘change their sex’. She has consistently turned a blind eye to the problem of trans indoctrination in schools.

The likes of Keegan and Nokes have totally lost touch with the public – and with reality. They will bend over backwards to try to appease the woke set. They will say literally anything – no matter how silly it makes them sound – that will help them fit in with the cultural elites.

It’s easy to laugh at woke Tories, desperate to ingratiate themselves with people who will never vote for them. But we shouldn’t ignore the damage they’ve done. For all the talk of the Conservatives being anti-woke culture warriors, many of them think and govern like Keegan, with dreadful consequences for the rest of society.

As the horrific Clapham attack showed, elite virtue-signalling can come at a huge cost.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.