In the Sunday Times yesterday, there was a cracking News Review piece by actress Imogen Stubbs on the subject of her daughter’s A-level Drama exam. Stubbs has appeared in Shakespeare many times, and her hubby Trevor Nunn has directed every classic play in existence. Foolishly, they thought their experience would be of great assistance to the kid, but in this ambition they were quite mistaken: the daughter failed. The answers they helped Nunn Jr give were deemed ‘inappropriate’ by the examining board, because they lay outside the syllabus rules on possible answers ‘available’ – and did not conform to allowed interpretations.

Much as I’d dearly love to dismiss this as Newscorp anti-pc bollocks, sadly I can confirm it is the way of things these days, because I had precisely the same experience while coaching my younger daughter through her English finals at Reading some years ago. I mentioned a parallel between Mr K in The Trial and the sister of the liberated woman in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, and Jo said this would be a big mistake – see above re Nunn the Younger. Equally disturbing was that my daughter had never heard of Franz Kafka anyway.

The sheer degree of arrant stupidity required to reach examining decisions like these is so great as to make me suspicious that it’s got anything to do with stupidity at all. I know educationalists who tell me that sink-estate kids are less well-read, and so restricting the allowed interpretations to those already specified helps ‘even up’ the balance between them and the middle class kids. This is nothing more than cheating in order to prove their own potty theories about kids from Underclass homes being just as bright and adventurous as those from the leafy glades of Sussex.

It’s nothing short of pernicious, but more to the point I sense that young Mr Gove may not as yet have the measure of this Harmandlesonian example of Room 101 at work. I think he should be told.

Elsewhere in the ST was another piece of nonsense about renaming teachers ‘Senior Learners’ so as not to offend the students – or pupils, as they used to be called when the game was keeping a beady eye on the little buggers. If the Tories truly want to dump the Fluffy millstone and have another crack at a straight win, they could do a lot worse than make a firm pledge to merge the Campaign for Plain English with The Slog, and declare all-out war on every last vestige of politically correct bullshit. I doubt if their majority would be under 200.

Jeremy Clarkson, meanwhile, wrote of retiring in his column. I’m not surprised: when your readership drops from 1.1 million to 23, you might as well.