Charles Clarke is unlikely to succceed where Estelle Morris failed. He'll flop

There is nothing generous about him: sullen, saturnine, truculent and chippy, he is eloquent only when expressing dislikes

Public sympathy is an unreliable guide to political performance. Estelle Morris did the decent thing, but this should not obscure the fact that she was a hopeless minister, with no judgement and few brains. Miss Morris had the misfortune to sit her A-levels well before the Labour Government had dumbed them down. So she failed. Her examiners were right.

Her lack of success as a Cabinet minister could have been predicted from her bloodline. Her father, Charles, and her uncle, Alf, both junior ministers in the 1974-79 Labour government, are amiable, sentimental, dull, worthy figures of the sort who can survive in the junior ranks of government, but they would have been hopelessly exposed at Cabinet level. Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, unlike Tony Blair, took their Cabinets seriously and generally chose them on merit. There was no place for either Morris brother.

Even after five and a half years as PM, however, Mr Blair nourishes the delusion that most Cabinet ministers can be treated as dignified aspects of the constitution rather than efficient ones. He never intended Miss Morris to run education policy. That would be done from No 10, while she mouthed platitudes and gave impressive performances at photo-calls. But this is not how the world works. Ministers cannot evade responsibility for their departments, and the only way in which she could discharge hers was to resign. Nothing in her career became her like the leaving of it – which does not mean that she is entitled to a second ministerial innings, though she will probably get one.

Yet there is a paradox. In one respect, Estelle Morris's departure could be bad news for English education. The melodrama of her haplessness has distracted attention from the structural weakness which bedevils education, and which goes well beyond one minister's incompetence. Over the past 20 years, clever education secretaries have been plentiful. Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke, John Patten, Gillian Shephard, David Blunkett; not a dud among them, yet none succeeded in their most basic responsibility: to raise standards in schools. None of them could turn the Department of Education into a force for good.

Ken Baker's experience was instructive. He decided that there ought to be a national curriculum setting out the building blocks of a child's education. He also decreed that there would be tests, to ensure that children were learning and to identify failing schools. That sounds like common sense, and so it might have been, but for the Department of Education. Long ago, its officials invented the opposite of the philosophers' stone. They can transmute gold into dross.

Under them, the simplicity of the Baker plan was eradicated. Teachers found their time invaded by form-filling. Pupils found themselves dominated by low-grade exams, denying them either a worthwhile qualification or pleasure in learning.

Ultimately, however, the ministers are more to blame than officials, for the real problem is philosophical, and only ministers can sort out philosophy. Because of chronic ministerial cowardice, quality and diversity in English state education are both being crushed under the weight of a failed philosophy: comprehensivisation.

The ideal underlying comprehensivisation was not educational, but egalitarian. Schools were to be reorganised to ensure equality of outcome. This explains the relentless campaign against schools and universities which value excellence above equality, and against the examinations – O-levels and the old-fashioned A-levels which Estelle Morris failed – whose results highlight differing attainment levels and frustrate uniformity.

During their 18 years, the Tories ought to have had the intellectual courage to overthrow the comprehensive philosophy. But they lacked the political courage to risk appearing to disparage the schools which the majority of voters' children must necessarily attend.

Back in 1997, however, it appeared that Tony Blair might confront the challenge which the Tories had shirked. He had no emotional attachment to state monopoly. He was happy to send his own children to a school which was only nominally comprehensive. If Tony Blair were prepared to give an honest answer to the question "Has comprehensivisation failed?", that answer would be "Yes".

Yet he is not prepared to launch a frontal assault. He is ready to let comprehensivisation wither away, but he will not acknowledge the necessity for radical reform and a new dispensation.

It is clear what ought to happen. All state schools should become state independent schools (SISs); all pupils should be endowed with an annual education voucher equal to the cost of their education. Nor would there be anything to prevent the Government from awarding disadvantaged children a voucher of higher value, to give schools an incentive to educate them.

At a stroke, this would introduce market forces and consumer pressure. There would be transitional problems. Rising expectations would inevitably outstrip the liberated schools' capacity to meet them. But no child would suffer from the new arrangements, and most would benefit. Over time, all would benefit. The only sufferers would be frustrated egalitarians, once the market had halted their Gramscian long march to capture state education.

In 20 years' time, schools will be free and pupils will be vouchered. But it is unlikely that the new Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, will do anything to further this process. Thus far, Mr Clarke has had a surprisingly good press. He has been credited with considerable intellectual ability, but on the basis of no evidence save the fact that he is not Estelle Morris. Anyone feeling sleepless could read through all of Mr Clarke's speeches without being stimulated to wakefulness by a single striking phrase or original idea.

Apropos of intellect, it is worth remembering that Charles Clarke spent several years working for Neil Kinnock. Unlike Peter Mandelson, Mr Clarke never showed any strain from the need to adjust his intellect to his boss's. He is forceful, but that does not necessarily betoken a serious mind.

He also has the defects of his qualities. There is nothing generous about Charles Clarke's personality: no evidence that he came into politics because of an overwhelming need to express his benevolence to the rest of mankind. Sullen, saturnine, truculent and chippy, he is only eloquent when expressing his dislikes. He is certain to turn his wrath on the so-called "elite" educational institutions, such as the schools and universities which educated him. He is much less likely to be able to win the trust of teachers or parents.

He is also much more likely to feel a covert nostalgia for the old days of egalitarian state control than he is to push ahead with progress and reform. Charles Clarke will be a less easy target than Estelle Morris, but there is no reason to suppose he will be a better Education Secretary.