The Sketch: An educated guess suggests new face makes old errors

Charles Clarke looks very odd for a politician, don't you think? He could be a conceptual artwork. He's like Tracey Emin's bed but untidier. And probably not as valuable. Or as significant to the intellectual development of the nation. But I quite like him. No, seriously, I quite want to like him. I quite like the idea of wanting to quite like him. Nothing he has done so far has made me not want to unlike the idea of liking him. What a plonker Charles Clarke is, don't you think?

That's the nice thing about politics for emotionally unstable people; it allows us to hold two opposite ideas in our heads at once, with all intervening grades of opinion. Politicians are like that; it's probably our fault, we get the representatives we deserve.

There was a very significant decrease in the amount of Edu-babble in question time yesterday, Mr Clarke's first as the new minister. If that was anything to do with him, so much the better. It's why we like him.

He tells us there is a great wasted potential of working-class children who don't go to university. That's nice. It's why we want to like him.

He says there is a serious funding gap, and university funding will have to be looked at. You can't dislike him for that. He says top-up fees or a graduate tax are the most likely ways of payment, and no one will be put off going to university by being made to pay. Honestly, what a plonker.

He's following the line of that wealthy nitwit Margaret Hodge. This was the minister, as Damian Green pointed out, who had admitted that the Government had widened the divide in higher education. This was the minister "who had miserably failed in getting disadvantaged students into university". She was the minister who declared herself proud at Britain's drop-out rate of 17.5 per cent. Proud, do you hear! Mr Green had quite a good morning. He'd found a briefing paper from the Department for Education suggesting every student should be paying fees.

This was entirely at odds with the Government's rhetoric on everything else, would the minister disown it? "We will not discriminate against poorer families any more than the present system does!" Mr Clarke replied. It's not much of a rallying cry, is it? You would have liked Richard Bacon's story. A school in his constituency had the lowest funding of any in the area and most classes were in Portakabins. Yet they had the best GCSE results of all. That should tell these target setters, these programme devisers, these self-important bench monkeys that excellence in schools has rock all to do with them.

They're here today, they're gone tomorrow, the mess they leave behind is eternal. Look: David Rendel quoted Estelle Morris from last year: "We introduced the new funding arrangements for students precisely to avoid universities levying additional charges. What has changed?" "What's changed," Mr Clarke began, but couldn't finish. What has changed is the minister. The gentle but inexorable deterioration in our education system continues.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com