My Verdict On 'The Great Debate'

Given that the post-mortems on BBC1 and ITV1 were conducted by a pair of brothers, I don't think either Dimbleby came out on top.

I am, at heart, a 'Question Time' man. While it is gratifying to see that Shami Chakrabarti is still in the land of living, she really didn't have any business being there, indeed doesn't really have any business ever appearing on television, other than in her capacity as director of Liberty. While it was gratifying to see that she did mention civil liberties - I heard her do so right at the very end, although I was channel-hopping with a defective remote, so she might have alluded to their decline more than once - she doesn't really have any business discussing anything else. However, should she ever be thrust forward for ennoblement as Baroness Chakrabarti of Blowhard-on-the-Box, a possibility I'm not sure William Hill's would give you odds against given the almost centrifugal speed at which she seems to attract honours, the big round of applause she got for saying good things about immigration might not have done her chances any harm at all. Whenever I see her on televison I cannot help but recall Lytton Strachey's acid observation on Cardinal Manning, that he possessed 'a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank'.

Micheal Gove, whose public utterances never fail to dispel the impression that he was the type of wee boy who stayed in the classroom at playtime in order to read 'The Lord of The Rings' or play 'Dungeons and Dragons', came out against grammar schools. I don't know whether or not he's ever read either of Correlli Barnett's books 'The Lost Victory' and 'The Verdict of Peace', but if not I would recommend he do so, and have a good long lie down afterwards. I certainly had to. In one or other of those books, Barnett recorded that the real reason that secondary moderns were so bad was that that for every pound that was spent on them, three were spent on the grammar schools. If grammar schools and vocational schools received pound-for-pound spending, it might just all be hunky-dory.

David Laws cannot help the way he looks. However, to my eyes he looks like a cross between Val Kilmer and a particularly cruel member of the Waffen-SS. I really got nothing else of value from his contribution.

Bunched together at the other end of the table was a kind of postmodernist Mad Hatters Tea Party comprised of Ed Miliband, John Sergeant and Nigel Farage, with Sergeant as the Dormouse. Miliband Minor bore the perpetually puzzled look favoured by exotic ruminants, while on a couple of occasions I thought that Farage was going to spontaneously combust.

Not a great night at all.