He's rough, he's tough but he must take a shine to Miliband's diamond

Out goes the meek minister who did not think she was up to the job. In comes the self-confident bruiser, a man who will get out his cane and thwack the teaching unions with one hand, while sorting out the A-level crisis with the other. It is time for a bit of machismo at the Department of Education.

If only it were as straightforward as that. The teaching unions are hailing Estelle Morris, now she has gone, as a saint among ministers. That is not quite what they were saying while she was in the job. Similarly, some of the reports since last week's reshuffle have suggested that Mr Clarke was a disastrous party chairman on the grounds that he alienated all the unions – not just the teachers – with his bullying candour. Again, it was not quite like that when he was in the job. Indeed, therapists would recognise some transference in the media's analysis. Mr Clarke roughed up journalists rather than trade union leaders. The journalists, nursing their wounds, are now writing that he duffed up almost everyone in his path. In reality, the unions were alienated because of some of the Government's policies rather than the style of Mr Clarke, who had at least tried to encourage more open political debate.

If the new Secretary of State for Education had been such a brutal crusher of dissent he would have had to have beaten himself up on several occasions. As party chairman he dared occasionally to question the government's policies and to admit that it had not always got it right. Take that, Clarke, you troublemaker! Don't hit me again, party chairman!

The much more pertinent question is not whether Mr Clarke is too much of a bruiser, but whether he is enough of one to take on one of the most pressurised jobs in government. There will be times, if he wants to make a success of the job, when he will have to confront Mr Blair, his influential aides, and the media. Ouch!

I am told that Ms Morris's opening words to her ministerial team after the last election were something along these lines: "There are Tony's departments and there are Gordon's departments. We are one of Tony's departments." Being one of Tony's departments can be hugely beneficial when taking on the Treasury and Gordon's departments in public spending rounds. When the Chancellor is being stroppy the Prime Minister intervenes, and Tony's department gets most of the cash that it had sought. Both Ms Morris and her predecessor, David Blunkett, have had good cause to be grateful for his interventions. As far as education is concerned, Mr Blair and his team are ready to intervene at breakfast, lunch and after dinner too.

But this is also part of the problem. Here is a familiar sequence of events: a newspaper runs a story about a relatively minor crisis in education. Downing Street panics and asks Ms Morris what she is going to do about it. Her first instinct is to recognise that she cannot do much about it because the powers lie with a quango or a local authority rather than with her department. After a second's thought she decides that she must act, partly to reassure No 10, and also because the newspapers are screaming. She announces that she is acting, only to find what she had realised in the first place: she has no power to act. The media, seeking to have it all ways, attack her for not acting and then for recklessly interfering when she does not have the power to do so. More broadly, they condemn her for failing to take responsibility and then for being a control freak when she attempts to take responsibility.

This pattern applied in different ways to the A-level fiasco, the row over the expulsion of disruptive pupils and the demand that the criminal records bureau vet all new teacher appointments. We are back in familiar territory – one recently explored in this column – in which ministers frequently accept or assume responsibility without having any power to act.

Enter the bruiser. Mr Clarke needs to live up to his reputation and be straight about this. The Government tried to do too much from the centre in its first term. Now in the Department of Education – and elsewhere – it is devolving some of its powers. This involves big risks. As we have discovered recently, some of the agencies responsible for local delivery are hopelessly incompetent. But Mr Clarke cannot mark all the A-level exams himself. Sometimes this means that he has to take a deep breath and tell Downing Street and the media that, although something might have gone wrong, there is not much he can personally do about it.

Not that Tony Blair is the first Prime Minister to have tried to micro-manage education policy. The former Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard had the chutzpah to pop up on the Radio 4 programme The World at One to wonder how Ms Morris coped with all the interference from Downing Street. Well, Mrs Shephard should know. Against her wishes John Major was determined to impose "a grammar school in every town". Only election defeat in 1997 prevented the preposterous policy from going ahead. As Mrs Shephard recognised at the time, it was all very well having one grammar school thriving, creaming off the best children, but what about the rest of the schools in the area?

This is a question that Mr Clarke must now ask himself as he reflects on Mr Blair's vision of a "post-comprehensive era". The Government is in danger of creating one or two privileged schools in each area. Again, the question has to be asked: what happens to the other schools in the region? Ministers state emphatically that a return to grammar schools by stealth is emphatically not their objective. David Miliband, the Schools minister, has a diagram in his departmental desk of a diamond linking four separate policies aimed at lifting the standard of secondary schools. One of the objectives is to make all secondary schools acquire a specialism, and then for each of the schools to collaborate with the others. I am much encouraged by Mr Miliband's diamond, but there is still a danger that some schools strike gold while others rust into bog-standard comprehensives soaking up the poor sods who do not make it to the thriving music academy down the road.

Mr Clarke now has the chance to make Mr Miliband's diamond sparkle into life. What with that, the unions, and university funding, he has much on his plate. More than enough, in fact, that the next time the media and Downing Street get into a frenzy about events outside his direct control, for him to state with a brutal, bruising candour: "Don't blame me. I'm only the Education Secretary."