And indeed, in my own couple of meetings with her, I found her frankness flattering and disarming. I wonder whether those attributes don't seem more attractive in death than they did at the time. "Nothing matters very much, and most things don't matter at all," reckoned Arthur Balfour Isn't that about as British as it gets?. That such schemes were doomed to failure was amply demonstrated by their grand summation: the Millennium Dome, that lasting monument to our uselessness with big ideas.Five years on, if we really do need a credo that might somehow dampen the spirits of would-be terrorists, reunite our towns and cities and steady our nerves, I'd pick the words of a Conservative leader whose only dreams came in his sleep, and who, unlike Mr Howard, actually made it to Downing Street. Indeed, as far as the current hoo-ha about national identity is concerned, the Prime Minister has a great deal to answer for.If the current "debate" started anywhere, it was in the period of political innocence during which Mr Blair talked about reinventing the UK as a "young country" and New Labour trumpeted "the rebranding of Britain". We are not, in short, a nation given to dreams, least of all self-consciously British ones.Instead, this country's philosophical gift to the world has been a kind of enlightened slovenliness, which most of our politicians used to ooze, until Margaret Thatcher decided the Tory Party needed its own Weltanschauung, and Tony Blair went one better by heralding the age of the party-leader-as-wide-eyed-messiah. Moreover, "all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia' stuff is done by small minorities".

And yet, leaving aside the propriety of a former health secretary becoming a cigarette salesman, would Clarke have been so sought after for that role had he not once sat in the Cabinet? Eight years ago the Tories were thrashed at the election partly because Labour had successfully, if not always fairly, tarred them with the brush marked "sleaze". Anyone who thought the chief function of politicians was to deal with such mundane tasks as fiscal planning, the running of the welfare state and the defence of the realm must have had pause for thought recently. Indeed, if a student is not capable of self-motivation, I would rather teach a less able person who is.I care very much about the issue not because I think universities have a special right to pronounce on the matter, but because my daughter is about to start her A-levels.David Robertson is professor of politics at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Hugh's College He is also a governor of the Loughborough Endowed Schools. They do not need to have their university entrance dangling there to motivate them. Nor need there be any concern about leaving the better minds unstretched - if those better minds are coupled with initiative and intellectual energy, they will find plenty to stretch themselves in any well-taught and designed syllabus. If this involves elements of vocational training, so be it - anything that occupies the minds and excites the interest of students can be taught well and rigorously, just as the existing "hard" subjects are, too frequently, taught sloppily and badly. Today's students are no lazier, and no more stupid, than those of previous generations, but they are offered media studies and psychology, which older generations were not.

The obvious thing to do is to teach maths and German better, and to devise attractive syllabuses. This is the priority, not fiddling with grading schemes to make the A-level a better predictor of undergraduate success. Using A-level grades to determine university entrance may even be counterproductive, frightening people off subjects they might otherwise enjoy for fear of dropping a grade.The A-level may or may not be the best way of spending the final two years at school - the overwhelming opinion among teachers seems to be that it is no longer a good finale, and a wider diploma should be introduced. Currently, commentators do little but bewail students' preference for so-called "soft" subjects rather than, say, maths and modern languages.