John Rentoul: Zig-a-zag-ah: the Gove & Balls show

It is only fair to report that, after the lurch to the right, David Cameron last week lurched back to the centre. This column noted last Sunday that he had repeatedly appeased the conservative press and Conservative activists since his return from holiday, with pronouncements on crime, inheritance tax, immigration and Europe. This represented a shift in the balance of influence, with Cameron favouring the core-vote strategy of Andy Coulson, his press secretary, over the centrist approach of Steve Hilton, his adviser.

Having zigged, however, Cameron has now zagged. On Monday, George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, accepted Labour's spending plans for the next three years, hoping to kill the idea of "Tory cuts" that is imprinted on the national consciousness. Then Michael Gove, the shadow Schools Secretary, wrote an article in The Independent that could have come from the bleeding-heart institute for the advancement of the educationally under-privileged.

Gove's article was, on the face of it, a lesser piece of evidence of convergence between the two main parties. Yet the contest between the rising stars of both sides, Gove and Ed Balls, will be a fascinating struggle.

And when it comes to education, there is no doubt that Cameron is now firmly camped on the centre ground.

This comes as something of a relief after the events of the early summer. It was in response to the Great Grammar School Imbroglio that Cameron made his first really big strategic mistake. After two weeks of hysteria from the right in response to the mild suggestion that more academies rather than grammar schools were the way to deal with educational disadvantage, Cameron retreated. He said that there were some circumstances in which new selective schools should be built.

Cameron compounded his error in his reshuffle at the start of July. That was when he moved David Willetts, who had made the speech rejecting selection that started the furore, from the schools brief. It looked like a show of weakness and a concession on policy. It emboldened the traditional right and made it more necessary to appease them in recent weeks.

It turns out, however, that the damage done by Cameron's retreat has been contained and reversed. The essential gain of Willetts' speech has been preserved. Its real importance was that he opposed the extension of academic selection in state schools, thus reversing Cameron's previous position, that schools should control their own admissions. By now I have lost track of whether we are zigging or zagging: all that matters is that Cameron has ended up in the right place, bang in the Blairite centre. Sacking Willetts was a mistake; replacing him with Michael Gove, who is if anything even more of a moderniser, guarantees that the centre will hold after all.

In his article last week, Gove responded to critics of the Tory policy review. It had suggested that primary-school leavers could be held back for a year if they were behind in what Gordon Brown last week called reading and counting (rather than literacy and numeracy – what a relief!). Educationists were not impressed, worrying about stigma and self-esteem.

"I'm afraid I don't have much time for that sort of attitude," wrote Gove. "I think it's unacceptable to throw young people into secondary schools without the skills necessary to learn, and leave them to sink or swim. That sort of casual indifference to lost human potential masquerading as a belief in progress is what I'm in politics to fight against."

Of course, Gove was mischievous to imply that the Government leaves under-achievers to sink or swim. All Brown's rhetoric over the past week has been about "no child left behind", early intervention, intensive one-to-one support and some of that has even been put into practice over the past decade.

Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Schools, said in a ridiculously flattering interview in The Guardian that he wants to focus on the "stubborn 20 per cent of children who aren't making the grade".

The point is that Gove and Balls are fighting over exactly the same territory. They both make much of their own children going to state schools. They both celebrate existing good schools but neither regards more selective schools as the way forward. They are both focused on raising up underperforming children in underperforming schools. The main difference between them is biographical. Whereas Balls is the son of a professor (Michael Balls, a leading expert in alternatives to animal testing), Gove is the adopted son of a fish merchant and, in Neil Kinnock's phrase, the first Gove in a thousand generations to go to university.

To hear Gove talk, you would think that his mentors were Julian Le Grand, the advocate of choice in public services who was Tony Blair's health adviser, and Andrew Adonis, the minister who is the driving force behind academies and who has been kept on by Brown.

It is hard to discern any substantial policy difference between Gove and Balls. If this seems surprising on the Tory side, it is equally significant on Labour's. What we Blairite ultras feared more than a Tory lurch to the right was a Labour lurch to the left. It has not happened. Academies are the test case, not because they are a magic answer to all education problems, but because they are at least a serious attempt to answer the right question. And they are a test of political courage because they are unpopular with much of the educational establishment while being popular with parents in deprived areas.

But Brown and Balls have been solid for academies. Indeed at last week's monthly news conference, the Prime Minister was enthusiastic about using the academy model to have good schools take over bad schools.

What will be interesting over the next few months – I don't think the election will be until at least 2009, by the way – is whether it will be Gove or Balls that is better at advancing the cause of Blairite reform.

The sticking point for both parties will be making it easier for parents, charities and even companies to set up new state schools. That is the key to breaking up the structures that were designed to promote educational equality but now stand in its way, and to give pupils a choice of different kinds – and sizes – of school. Last week's Tory policy review balked at it, and Blair was driven back from it by his own party.

It could be significant, then, that James O'Shaughnessy has been made political director at Tory HQ. At the Policy Exchange thinktank he advocated a bounty on the heads of children at failing schools so that other schools or new schools would have an incentive to take them.

Neither Gove nor Balls will want publicly to admit that they want to be the "heir to Blair", but that is what they are competing to be. In Private Eye's brilliant early take on Supreme Leader Brown's regime, Comrade Blair and his cult of personality may have been airbrushed out of history. But his legacy lives on.

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