When history does judge us, however, it will forgive most of us for being "people of our time"; it will be said that we could not have known better, we could not have seen how offensive our assumptions were, just as the men and women of 19th-century Britain could not have known how fiercely we would reject their belief in the hierarchies of class and race. 

Except that history will also record that someone did know better — that Michael Gove did try to change things and how all too many people fought him every step of the way.

There is an odd political reversal here. A century ago it was broadly the Left attacking the Victorian and Edwardian hierarchies and arguing for the essential equality of all human beings. Yet today it is a teaching profession with an overwhelmingly centre-left bias which has been busily re-erecting those hierarchies and deeming some classes of children capable of enlightenment and others not. And it has been a Conservative Secretary of State who has insisted that, on the contrary, all children can learn great poetry by heart, write grammatical sentences, know their national history and understand the natural world — that all children, whatever their class and colour, have the ability and the right to do anything a boy at Eton can do. 

Then the Conservative party ousted the one man who was fixing the broken system. I blamed David Cameron. But then the statistics and opinion data rolled in, claiming that Gove was a liability, the most unpopular minister in the government, not just among teachers but among parents and the public. 

I couldn't understand it. Gove had introduced new accountability measures for schools so that they couldn't game the exam system to fool parents. He had made league tables more transparent so that parents could better judge a school. And behind the scenes he was breaking the monopoly of the child-centred ideology that has dominated Ofsted and the teacher-training institutions. Thanks to Gove, teachers who have not been brainwashed by those institutions into believing that group work and never giving children the right answer is the way to be a good teacher are now once again able to work in our state schools, just as they have always been able to work in private schools.

Last month's exam results provided measurable proof that Gove's efforts to encourage pupils to take more academic subjects, such as the English Baccalaureate, are working.

So their children were better off, but still people didn't back the reforms. Why? Because "humankind cannot bear very much reality". Perhaps one thing Gove had not sufficiently accounted for is how confronting the stark truth of how poor the education system is would, in the short and medium term, bring a psychological cost: it would make everyone — teachers, pupils and parents — feel worse. 

Labour's upbeat fairytales made everyone feel good about themselves. Thanks to this collective ideological deception our children felt good about their higher grades, most teachers believed they were doing a good job and parents thought their children were becoming better educated. Gove took all that away. We don't want harder GCSEs. We don't want a new national curriculum with a minimum, knowledge-based core. We all benefit from the regular dumbing-down of exams and that Kool-Aid is too addictive to put down. Better to put Gove down instead. Cameron was only doing what the country wanted. He was doing what Labour had done for 13 years: he put presentation, polls and feelings before real change.