Back To School

Michael Gove's wife is a close friend of Samantha Cameron, so a Cabinet position has had to be found for him.

Mercifully, he is not allowed anywhere near the foreign policy that is his genuine interest. And today, hidden beneath his headline-grabbing public school suggestion that the Army be sent in to run the schools attended by the oiks, he has done a remarkable thing: he has effectively recanted the single most destructive thing that Margaret Thatcher ever did, namely the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs.

He has not announced its formal reversal, just as he had not announced the restoration of the grammar schools of which she closed so many that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, and with them of the Secondary Moderns that were so much better than what has replaced them. But any step in the right direction is to be welcomed.