'I weep for you,' as the Walrus once said

The week's events have shown me that I have spent the last decade or so mixing up Ulrika Jonsson with Mariella Frostrup, and vice versa. It is, surely, a pardonable confusion. After all, they are both Scandinavian blondes with pretensions to intelligence; unlucky in love; somehow connected with television, though I have never managed to catch any of the programmes they have been involved with; and like the MP in the Henry James story who was famous for being famous. But I have never been in any danger at all of confusing Estelle Morris with Charles Clarke. One of them has a beard, and it is not Ms Morris.

She has not found it necessary to die or even to attain a great age before being assumed into that socialist pantheon which includes Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan, John Smith (now, alas, in danger of being pushed off his plinth) and, the most recent arrival, Tony Benn. Ms Morris's alternative path to sanctity is that trodden by Lord Carrington and Sir Thomas Dugdale.

Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary over the invasion of the Falklands; Dugdale as Minister of Agriculture over the Crichel Down case of 1954. Here the ministry had wrongly refused to return to its owner some agricultural land in Dorset compulsorily purchased during the war. Both of them are held out to us before our admiring eyes as honourable men who did not hesitate to accept ministerial responsibility.

But Dugdale's case is not quite as simple as it is made out to be. He defended his civil servants throughout, refusing to admit they had done anything wrong. He resigned because he did not receive the support to which he felt himself entitled from his colleagues, either in the government or on the back benches. Indeed, the Conservative backbenchers were after his head, which they duly got, as they later got the heads of Leon Brittan in 1986 and David Mellor in 1992.

Ms Morris's case is not like this. Her level of support on the back benches was not so great as the old party comrades are now claiming. But there was never any demand for her resignation. There was a certain loyalty to her. It was not, as some foolish fellow (not the invaluable Mr Andrew Marr, somebody else) claimed on the BBC on Wednesday evening, that she was the embodiment of New Labour. It was rather for the opposite reason. In her person, though not always in her policies, she represented the pieties of Old Labour, possessing as she did – as she still does – a pleasant Manchester accent and two former Labour junior ministers, Charles and Alf Morris, as her father and uncle respectively.

But there were few who thought she was doing the job particularly or even moderately well. As I wrote here on 6 October:

"She is out of her depth and clearly struggling. As the PE teacher which she herself once was might have put it: 'Come out of the pool immediately, Estelle. That water is much too deep for you.'"

To her credit, Ms Morris has now emerged from the pool of her own free will. Mr Robin Cook's accusation that she was "hounded" out of office by the vindictive media is humbug. Compared to the treatment some other Labour ministers have received – Bevan, John Strachey, Ben Smith, Edith Summerskill, Harold Wilson himself – she was given a remarkably easy ride. In her own generation, Mr Peter Mandelson and Mr Stephen Byers both had a harder time.

Indeed, in her notable interview with Ms Sue Littlemore on BBC News 24, she conceded that she had no complaints against the press. She did not care for the attention she had received but accepted that this was now the way of the world. She was resigning because she could not handle a large department such as Education now is. Oddly, perhaps, she denied that this meant she was out of her depth. This relative candour has resulted in our being overwhelmed by a wash of sentimental claptrap the like of which we have not seen since John Smith went to meet his Maker. I am reminded of the Walrus eating the oysters in Through the Looking-Glass:

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:

"I deeply sympathise."

There are unlikely to be any tears shed either by or on behalf of Ms Morris's replacement, Mr Clarke. By promoting him and Dr John Reid and Mr Peter Hain, Mr Tony Blair has put on to the field an entirely new front row, ferocious in their aspect, formidable in their skills. Or so one might gather after reading some of Friday's easily impressed papers. But the Tories are now in such a state that they would be scared stiff of any battling granny conjured up by a news editor.

Mr Clarke may be tough, but he has his sensitive side as well. He does not take kindly to slights, real or imagined. He is reluctant to follow Our Lord's advice and turn the other cheek. On the contrary: he lashes out, usually in the form of a letter. Over the years I have accumulated a whole sheaf of missives from Mr Clarke. Usually they are about the lack of credit that is given to him for his part in the Kinnock revolution – or, what amounts to the same thing, about the attribution of changes in that period to Mr Mandelson rather than to him. I have thought of ordering a printed stock reply:

"Dear Charles: Thank you for your letter. I am sorry you are upset. However, [insert justification, explanation or excuse.] All good wishes. Yours ever, Alan."

Much of the lamentation for Ms Morris comes about because, in accordance with her background in Old Labour, she was a minister for the producer rather than for the consumer. Mr Clarke, though he was once briefly a teacher of mathematics, will not be like that.

But Education has always been a difficult department. It has attracted some of the outstanding talents of the last century: Edward Boyle, R A Butler, C A R Crosland, David Eccles. The trouble in their day was that they could not get anything done without the co-operation of the local authorities. The most powerful figure in education was a redoubtable Scotsman, Sir William Alexander, the general secretary of the Association of Education Committees. He used to chain smoke untipped Virginia cigarettes and, by then a life peer, died in 1993 at the fine old age of 87.

Today the power has moved from local government to a whole succession of educational quangos. It is a change that has occurred in most other departments as well. It was all started by Margaret Thatcher. No one any longer knows where, if anywhere, responsibility lies. Ms Morris discovered this in the rows about A-levels and about the non-vetting of school workers for criminal records – an absurd consequence of our paedophilic hysteria. At the same time people of 19-and-a-half from No 10 intervene constantly in matters which they do not remotely understand. Mr Clarke does not have an enviable task.