In fairness to Gove he genuinely believes in what he is doing and does actually care a great deal about education. He has even done a few good things.

The trouble is he's not a great minister and has a nasty habit of making an arse of himself. That Mister Man cock-up alone should have been enough to get him replaced. No excuses for that sort of thing.

As far as schools go, I was very close to becoming a teacher and know quite a few of them. What the unions say is mostly bull. We have some truly crap schools and some truly crap teachers amongst them. On the whole we're pretty good, and have improved a great deal in recent years (one of the few good things Labour achieved).

I agree with your opinion on public schools and the other privately funded schools. When I have children I'll be damned if I send them to such ghastly mind warping places.

It never rains but it pours .......... now we have a senior Tory close to David Cameron referring to rank and file Conservative members as 'swivel-eyed loons'.
Only someone slightly out-of-touch with society and reality could invent a phrase that really makes no sense but is both condescending and highly insulting
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22579346
Poor old DC, he makes a quick trip across the pond to DC to see the Pres and it's open warfare in the Conservative Party, exacerbated by his support of gay rights and followed up by UKIPs showing in the recent elections.
My own MP for Mid-Bedfordshire Nadine Dorries who is as mad as a box of frogs at the best of times is now threatening to stand on a joint Conservative/UKIP ticket at the next election.
Que pasa.....

Are you sure you're a member of society yourself, Nigs? People use phrases and insults that make no sense all the time.

The Tories are not in revolt. The loyalty shown to DC has been unprecedented for the Conservatives. What is currently happening is a major attempt to convince our European friends that the UK leaving is possible. Frankly, despite our reputation, most of them thought our chances of going through with it to be virtually nil, which was awful to our bargaining position. With so many government members openly saying they would leave the EU if the referendum was now they are making it believable. With the apparent rise of UKIP this is being reinforced, and opinion polls are adding to it.

There is still no chance we would leave the EU, but by God we're making it look like there is :)

Nadine Dorries is indeed as mad as a box of frogs. She will not be able to stand on a joint Tory/UKIP ticket of course - if she stands as a UKIP candidate the Tories would expel her from the party.

Now David Cameron is being warned his support for gay marriage could lose him the election, this is from his own supporters...... wtf, how disloyal

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22585093

And now apparently David Cameron is losing control of his party over Europe, this comes from Tory Grandee Lord Howe who brought down Margaret Thatcher all those years ago ..... the Tory hatchet-man !!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22585228

What has happened this week, the UK Tory Party has lost the plot.
Freedom for the Downing Street 1

Cameron is regarded by many in his own party as a failure. Whatever happens, he won't be Prime Minister after the next election - if he survives that far...

Yes but will Gove succeed Cameron?

I really hope so. Gove's a horrible little weirdo and an incompetent minister. I'd love him to be Tory leader. It would do them no end of damage.

Good news ...... apparently there complete unity in the Conservative Party.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22586142
Next thing you're gonna hear that should feel the PM, everyone is behind him, of course they are, all holding knives waiting to stab him in the back.
There will be stalking horses from both the left and right of the Party, probably Hunt and Gove but it won't take much to get BoJo to chuck his hat into the ring. Question is will Boris Johnson be the new Conservative Party leader before or after the 2015 General Election? It's all about timing now......

feel the PM s/be worry the PM

The worrying thing is that Gove is not the most useless tosser in the current Conservative Party. He's just an ideology driven fool, ignoring facts to present his own agenda. We have a health secretary who believes in magic sugar pills, and should have been sacked when he was culture secretary, and a Chancellor who is singularly unqualified for the job. And, ever since it was pointed out to me, our PM looks like Iggle-Piggle

The Chancellor is doing his job nicely. He is managing the economy as well as any Chencellor could (when it comes down to it Chancellors can't really do a lot) and is drawing the flak off David quite beautifully. Most of the ministers are doing well enough with no more than the usual background level of cock-ups going on.

It says a lot for Conservative loyalty that the best Labour foot soldiers like Nigee can come up with as a threat to Cameron is Boris Johnson. There is nothing that advertises the lack of threat more than that. Boris Johnson has written himself out off PMship by nurturing his comic personality, and it will take decades to make himself look like a real leader.

David is quite safe.

@Oct - I remember having a similar exchange with you some months ago when you assured me that UKIP was absolutely no threat to the Conservatives.
Wind forward - my MP Nadine Dorries wants to stand on a Tory-UKIP ticket, the writing has been on the wall for some time but is blind loyalty that prevents you being able to see it. It's not disloyal to say what you can see is staring you in the face.
I like David Cameron for a number of reasons:-
1) His favourite song is 'Ernie the Fastest Milkman in the West'
2) He supports gay marriage
3) He supports the Chancellor who I'm convinced is a closet Socialist as he is one of Labours biggest electoral assets and makes Ed Balls look electable, and that is not easy to do
4) Although David is public school rich boy naive I still think he is trying to do his best and you can't despise a man for honestly trying his best

The only reason I like the idea of BoJo being Conservative Party Leader is because he is great value for money, he is an upper-class twit but he is hilarious and he is popular, the Tories could do a lot worse......

Can this week get any worse ....... Police have searched the Commons office of MP Nigel Evans in relation to a "serious arrestable offence".
This follows on from:-
"Deputy House of Commons Speaker Nigel Evans has been released on bail after being arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22594276

The Tories could really do with a Labour MP caught dogging on Hampstead Heath or basically any other story that diverts attention away from their party... I might start a thread called ToryWatch so you can all see first hand how a Political Party slowly destroys themselves from the inside out, this has truly been a weekus horribilis !!

I don't get how the UK schools are set up. To me a private school is one paid for privately, hence the name private and the reason rich people send their kids there. Public school, on the other hand, is paid for with tax payer dollars and is generally the lower end of the educational scale over here. Why do they call them public an private overseas in an apparent backward fashion?

@Draug - calling privately-funded schools public schools makes little sense at all, just like a lot of the people coming out of these schools, academically gifted but socially deprived and/or depraved.
Then we ask them to run the country, then we elect them, and then when they fail they tell us that nobody could have done a better job than them (and they truly believe that), democracy has a lot to answer for........ so does 'private' education.
A lot of these 'academic high-achievers' also go into investment banking ......

In saying that I'm a bit of a hypocrite as I'm thinking about sending my son to this school when he turns 13....... I sincerely hope someone or something changes my mind between now and then (and saves me £15k plus school fees every year), nice school though......
http://www.bedfordschool.org.uk/upper-school/

@ Nigs

Good God, man, why?!? Your son will come out the other end all nobified! Don't be so cruel as to force that on him.

But why do those damn brits reverse it? IF it is privately funded, it is a private school? Are they just that dense?

@ Draug

They are called public because they were open to any members of the public, as opposed to religious schools which were only open to members of that religion, or schools run by the guilds. The term 'public school' only really applies to a handful of some of the oldest schools, although many Brits refer to all fee paying schools as public schools.

What you call a public school we call a state school as they are paid for by the state. That is so simple even you Yanks should be able to understand.

Sweet Lord Octoplus that last part really yanked out of the keyboard didn't it

We've gone off that Bedford School because they like rugby, cricket and rowing and not footie, my lad won't get on with toffs, that is something I have to bear in mind. I have to find a good school with 'normal people' in it.

I'm from the lovely country of USA and I'm not entirely certain about terms and titles used in the British system, but if the Head Teacher is infact the highest authority in the school, how in the hell does this daft dimbo think that life as a head teacher is not going to be tough? It sounded like she was just trying to find a scapegoat for her failures and is blaming this Gove guy.

That is not to say Gove is a genius or anything, since I don't know enough about the guy to make a fair judgement, but I would think that this Head Teacher is a tool for thinking that the government is not going to be "knee deep" in everything related to the school. Live up to the standards or get the hell out of the way.

@ Nigs

Seriously? I always thought the toffs loved a bit of footie... as long as you called it soccer and started each games lesson with a detailed re-enactment of the Old Carthusians beating the Old Etonians 3-0 to win the FA Cup in '81, Huzzah!

I played footie over at Eton a couple of times when I was at school in Slough, they beat us but they were ever so nice about it, after the match we were treated to tea at the student restaurant, how very civilized.

See, now that public thing makes sense. State is what we call public. Public is what we can non-affiliated private, and religious is what we can church-based private (or religious). K, it is finally logical. The state is what made it make sense.

Oh no, now the Clacton Conservatives are laying into Cameron on Newsnight and they are interviewing an ex-Tory member of UKIP.
They are banging on about gay marriage, they lost the vote and they don't like it up 'em to quote common parlance.

Oy! What is this fucked up language you speak?

Nigs, I don't know why you're getting so excited. The Tories are a party of individuals who pride themselves on their ability to think independently and as such live in a perpetual state of argument. It will be forever thus.

Personally I prefer that way of working of Labour's habit of pretending everything is rosey despite all the evidence to the contrary, and suddenly you wake to find a completely new leadership and everyone openly booing the last lot.

Speaking of all things British... Doctor Who! Awesome season or what? And that surprise guest appearance at the end (plus all the digital adding of "Impossible Girl" to all the past Doctors except they seem to have not included Eccleston or Tennant. I didn't expect McGann and they obviously used a double for Colin Baker...

Now if they would just do one of the Two Doctors/Three Doctors type episodes like they used to do. Get Tennant and Eccleston to return for one offs and maybe even bring in a couple of companions...

Loved the last episode, but there were a few poor ones. The journey to the centre of the TARDIS could have been so much better, and I wasn't a big fan of the submarine one either.

Yeah, those two were week. But I loved the one with Dame Diana Rigg and her daughter. She looks a lot like her mom in her younger days (On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Emma Peel/The Avengers).

weak... typo.