A familiar story - bend it like Blair and lose it like Beckham

It was all so reminiscent of something else. The crescendo of hope, the climax of euphoria, the abrupt collapse.

Last Friday, after the second goal, when reality came prancing through the English defence, football became more than a metaphor, it became an allegory. English football: English politics. World Cup 2002: Election 1997.

The teams had had an impossible task but we dared to hope, after years of disappointment we dared to believe. They were different these people. They were new, they were young, two were egregiously talented. They were led by an artful performer with enormous skills. And what a wife. We really thought they could pull it off, change the whole English paradigm.

The "management of decline" was the culture we 50-year-olds had been bred in. We never expected England to win things, you couldn't hope for English victories without forming an obsessive relationship with disappointment.

How we shouted at the early lead. What a roar. You couldn't hear yourself think. You didn't need to think. Belief wipes out the need for thought.

Everything was suddenly possible: the balance had tipped from enduring failure to sparkling success.

My opinion about football isn't worth anything, so I'm prepared to believe the one they call David Beckham is good at football. Everybody says so, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Tony Blair? Well, he certainly won things.

He has been a terrific winner of things. And when things were won, he modestly accepted the credit while paying tribute to everyone else.

But we knew, really, didn't we? We men? We knew England weren't actually going to beat Brazil? When that wide-mouthed salsa dancer streaked through the defence with his mad legs going, we recognised an old, underlying, familiar reality. The euphoria settled like a pan of milk going off the boil. When the second goal bent in, as if by the one called Beckham, something rather shameful happened. Something changed inside me and, assuming we were going to lose, I started disinvesting rapidly in the team.

There are those who say football is a matter of life and death, but they're wrong. Likewise, politics is less important than politicians think.

Politicians can make things worse but they have a very limited ability to make things better. Their inability may be the thing that is slowly becoming apparent. Reality is re-emerging. It is not pleasant but it is familiar.

If the Government is rattled, this is why. They know that past a certain point, the same thing will happen to casual voters as happened to casual football enthusiasts. When the old realities emerge, when the old picture of our schools 'n' hospitals remains unchanged there will be a sudden irreversible change of mood.

When either group see things going the wrong way, they suddenly disinvest, and turn on those who had raised their hopes.

Tony Blair's brilliant. He can bend it like Beckham, but it may not do him any good in the end.

Power to the people, not just to journalists

Well, that was very nice of Sony. After six weeks of failing to get a new power cable for my nifty little PCG via its call centre, I ran a consumer warning on the subject last week. The multinational promptly got in touch, offering to pay the £115 charged by another supplier for the equipment.

The ethics of this troubled me for a moment. Should the fact of having a column in a national paper give one preferential treatment in the matter of cable supply? I asked whether Sony'd do the same for anyone who rang for a part, and the answer was affirmative. So there it is: if your PCG power cable's powerless, ring customer supremo Stewart on 01932 816613. The problem was in the call centre. Half a dozen calls failing to get any useful information or indeed any contact with a supervisor.

I think a book needs to be written on call centres. They are the extra circle of hell that theologians have been looking for. Anyone got any good stories?

The original public-private partnership that sank our schools – at least for the poor

An inner-city activist for ethnic minority children was telling me the single largest reason, in her view, why sink school results were so bad: "The expectations of the teachers," she said. It's an unprovable idea but I like it and have decided to believe it a bit.

High expectations are harder to deploy than low ones and it's all more difficult than it used to be. These days it's so much more difficult to get children to do things they don't want to.

The decline of standards in education – widely denied though it may be – is one of the great state crimes of post-war Britain. It's been the result of an unholy alliance between the state and private enterprise. Politicians want more pupils to get better grades because (incredibly) they think it makes themselves look good. And because private examining bodies are paid per pupil, they attract applicants by offering, indirectly perhaps, better grades.

In my day, my school took Oxford and Cambridge board papers because they were the most difficult. Extraordinary idea, it seems now.

My son is taking his maths A-level. I told him they were the toughest A-levels in the canon because maths had dumbed down least of all the subjects. He gave me an amused look and said they'd been shown papers from 10 years ago: they were impossible.

We in the middle classes can fret and strut about the decline but we know we can make up the difference somehow with extra tuition, exam retakes and private schools, God help us. The great crime is for the poor, the trapped, the North of England. As their population falls and their relative house prices drift downwards their only hope of "community regeneration", as the cant has it, is of businesses moving in to take advantage of lower wages and higher educational levels.

The Government solution is to edge back towards some sort of half-baked grammar school plan, in a "Grandmother's Footsteps" sort of way. Timidity will kill it. Its plan is to turn bog-standard comprehensives into "specialist schools". These will concentrate on sport. Or art. Or some religious principle. Yes, we've come to this.

We know what specialists these schools will turn out. Illiterate midfield losers who'll never get a job except to teach other illiterate midfield losers. Ditto innumerate paint-hurling artists; idiotic pain-feeling thespians; creationists; fundamentalists of other sorts. It's the single most efficient way to make ghettoes in our society.

What public schools used to do, and what private schools still do, I believe, is find out what children were good at and then make them do it.

But no one was allowed to kennel themselves in their specialism. The XV acted. The forms all played rugby against each other. Even the ones whose only talent was smoking had a place. Talk about generalists: rugby-playing spotlight-driven smokers got Oxbridge scholarships. It's what was called a liberal education. Evening school, lessons on Saturday morning, compulsory sport and extra-curricular activities.

Tony Blair should do something bold and brave. He should model the state education system on Fettes, his old public school.

Political capital can rise as well as fall

In question time last week, the Prime Minister discounted accusations that the stock market had crashed. He said the market was up enormously on what they'd inherited in 1997, in his first answer by £300bn, in his second by £250bn.

It was observed that he had taken front bench advice from Gordon Brown before making these claims. Michael Howard, the shadowy shadow Chancellor baited Mr Brown the next day, and repeated the charge that the market was 2 per cent down over the five years.

"When he made that statement, was he accurately reflecting what the Chancellor was whispering in his ear, or are the Chief Secretary and the Chancellor now among the 56 per cent of the electorate who do not regard the Prime Minister as honest or trustworthy?" Mr Howard asked. Is the market up or down over the past six years? The Treasury offered to send me an e-mail clarifying these matters, they are generous souls. Delivery is a problem as ever, of course, and nothing has been received so far.

We can only assume the Prime Minister misled the House. No doubt he'll be setting the record straight as soon as possible.

¿ Last week's item noting a likeness between the Chancellor's aide Ed Balls and the superhero Spider-Man was incorrect. Mr Balls has a pronounced physical resemblance to mild-mannered Peter Parker rather than to his alter ego, the scarlet-suited, bug-eyed, web-covered spinning machine.