The newly appointed education minister Andrea Jenkyns has responded to complaints after making a rude gesture outside Downing Street, saying she was provoked by a “baying mob”. The Tory MP, a Johnson loyalist, appeared to raise her middle finger as she walked through the street’s black gates, in a video shared on Thursday evening. In a statement shared on Twitter on Saturday, Jenkyns said she should have shown “more composure” but declined to apologise, saying the incident came after she received multiple death threats. “On Thursday morning I went to Downing Street to watch the prime minister’s resignation speech. A baying mob outside the gates were insulting MPs on their way in as is sadly all too common,” she said. “After receiving huge amounts of abuse from some of the people who were there over the years, and I have also had seven death threats over the last four years. Two of which have been in recent weeks and are currently being investigated by police, I had reached the end of my tether. “I responded and stood up for myself. Just why should anyone have to put up with this sort of treatment. I should have shown more composure but am only human.”
Earlier on Saturday the Commons leader, Mark Spencer, said Jenkyns should explain her behaviour. Spencer, a former chief whip, told BBC Breakfast he did not believe the gesture was “the right thing to do at all” and that Jenkyns would have to justify her actions. “I do understand emotions were running pretty high and they were pretty raw on that day. But I don’t think that was the right thing to do at all,” he said. Dame Alison Peacock, the chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, has written to Susan Acland-Hood, the Department for Education’s permanent secretary, to complain about Jenkyns’s behaviour as a departure from ministerial codes requiring ministers to maintain “high standards of behaviour”, reported Schools Week. Peacock wrote: “I understand that these are tense uncertain times in politics. But to proceed with a ministerial appointment of someone who is unable to abide by the principles of public life is sinking to a new low.” Jenkyns’s action was also criticised by Katharine Birbalsingh, a headteacher and chair of the government’s Social Mobility Commission, who said: “I said a few weeks ago that Boris Johnson was not a good role model for kids. I had no idea how bad it could get.” Jenkyns was appointed as a parliamentary undersecretary of state at the Department for Education on Friday in a reshuffle by Johnson. The footage appears to have been filmed shortly before Johnson announced he was stepping down as leader of the Conservative party. It is unclear who the gesture was aimed at. On Saturday George Freeman, the former minister for science and innovation who was one of more than 50 ministers who resigned from government earlier this week, said: “Ministers should set the highest standards in office. I’m sorry but this is appalling conduct for a minister of the crown. “This is exactly why we need a new prime minister: to restore the ministerial code and respect for the responsibilities of service in public office.”
In response to the video, the shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, tweeted: “Ministers aren’t expected to be perfect. But is it really too much to ask that they don’t treat the public like this?” The Lib Dem MP Layla Moran tweeted: “I spent my career before politics as a teacher, where I taught young people to think for themselves, stand up for what’s right and to treat each other with respect. “How on earth can we ask young people to behave with Andrea Jenkyns as an education minister. Apologise or resign.”