The danger with Mr Blair’s education, education, education obsession is that people without degrees are deemed to be somehow inferior because they didn’t spend three years having a great time going to parties, going to clubs, even occasionally going to lectures.Of course university is fun. Mine was full of posers who tied their racehorses to the rail outside the Reading Room or went to lectures dressed like Lawrence of Arabia. Here’s where I come clean and confess that after a year I was heartily fed up with the self-conscious undergraduate scene and applied for a sabbatical in Colorado.I sympathise with the thousands of disappointed school-leavers whose contentious A-level results have deprived them of a university place and the chance to start their media studies degree Here’s some friendly advice. Instead of studying the art of communications, why not get a job on your local paper? Harry Evans, legendary editor of The Sunday Times, began his career as a tea boy on the Newcastle Journal.

Michael Holroyd, the biographer, said his university was the Maidenhead library Take heart, there is life outside the campus.. Recently arrived on my desk is a stylish yellow and white brochure that looks for all the world like a company annual report or the sort of privatisation propaganda that “Sid” tried to seduce us with many moons ago. It is, in fact, the Liberal Democrats’ latest policy document, which argues for local funding and provision of such basic services as education and health. Pare out the old, big-L, Liberal emphasis on everything local, however, and the language could equally be New Labour or New (now old, ie Thatcherite) Tory.Conference season exposes just how monolingual our once-distinct parties have become. What every political party is trying to offer us these days is – as the title of the Lib Dems’ brochure has it – Quality, Innovation, Choice, which is presumably what their market research tells them we want. Sometime they are going to need our votes, after all.Well, I am all for quality and innovation, and I am quite keen on receiving good value for my tax money (another favourite political marketing pitch).

But I am less and less sure about choice.Singly or in compounds (consumer choice, school choice, hospital choice, you’ve heard them all), Choice fosters all kinds of good feelings. To have a choice (or rather to be promised one in the future) makes us think well of ourselves and of those who are so flatteringly treating us as citizens rather than subjects.”Choice”, and its constant companion “empowerment”, are the God, mother and apple-pie of contemporary democracy. The assumption is that all we well-educated, technically savvy Britons want nothing so much as to manage our own destiny. Rather than ordering us around, today’s politicians aspire to be “facilitators”; they see their job as providing the “choices” – and ours to choose.Which is where the deception begins.