A GOOD rule of thumb for columnists, politicians, and similar ranters is to beware of easy targets. Build too fantastical an image of a top-hatted or baseball-capped enemy, and you rapidly become a bore and a bigot.

New Labour seemed, for a while, to have grasped this. Tony Blair set out wagging like a national spaniel, anxious to make friends everywhere. Gradually, new Labour’s tone soured. The war on foxhunting is an obvious example, rich in illogical loathing. But it is not, in the end, very important. Far more serious is the war being waged by the Government against the great universities. The “benchmark” set for their intake of state school pupils is a deliberately crude tool; last week, when the Higher Education Statistics Agency named and shamed institutions that fail to meet targets which the Government plucked from the air, it was a calculated act of bullying. A group of perceivedly “toff” universities has been shown the red card; it is made clear to them that unless they raise their state school admissions, it will cost them dear when it comes to setting top-up fees.

Cambridge, say the bullies, “should” have got 76.8 per cent of its intake from state schools; it managed 57.6 per cent. Oxford “needed” 77.2 per cent, but got only 55.4 per cent. Even worse “offenders” were places such as the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music and the Courtauld Institute; other villains were Exeter, Bristol, Durham — the usual suspects. The figures are used not as research, merely as reproach. Those with a taste for easy targets can now spring forwards to rant against “elitist” education and “snobbish” dons. Much is said about “holistic” approaches, where admission to university is determined not only by your results, acquired knowledge, wide reading, articulacy, ability and passionate wish to learn, but by your level of social disadvantage. Little is said about how universities are supposed to reorganise their teaching to enable the poor devils with the disadvantages to catch up on the basics that a publicly funded education has not supplied.

The benchmarks — which will mutate into quotas, once financial penalties are set — are populist, savage and pointless attempts at social engineering. The main motive appears to be to attack independent schools and make parents afraid to use them, lest it prove impossible to get to the best universities. There are signs that this is working, as a hysterical war brews between nervous private schools and those universities that expect higher grades from better-taught children. There is also anecdotal evidence that parents are switching their children cynically into state sixth forms. We hear little about any moves to penalise state schools in rich enclaves; and nothing at all about the unfairness of rich people such as the Blairs hiring clandestine tutors from Westminster School to gold-plate their young without losing their state-school status.

Yet the only logical way to treat the figures on state school entry to top universities is not as reproof, but as research. If your track athletes don’t win, you don’t force the Olympic committee to set a gold-medal quota; you look at their training and their food. If private education gives children things that many state schools do not, the answer lies in improving the poorer schools, not nobbling the better ones. To take the most glaring example in last week’s figures — why do you suppose that the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music have the largest private school intake, and miss their benchmark by the biggest margin? Is it anything to do with the attrition of music teaching in the state sector? Well, fancy that. And why do you suppose that in the 1960s — without an admissions czar in sight — Oxford had far more state school pupils than it does now? I remember them: they were my friends, my generation, sons and daughters of working-class Britain, the pride of their grammar schools.

The truth is that admissions academics try very hard to hook the brightest pupils. They make reasonable allowances for those from bookless families and poor schools. But there is a point beyond which they cannot go, because to do a serious university degree demands a basic foundation of knowledge. Even so, they try: many offer catch-up courses in mathematics, classical languages or music, and welcome mature students from access courses. Moreover, universities that interview make strenuous efforts to identify not just the kind of intelligence which passes A levels — mechanistic, formulaic exams — but the kind that is creative, exploratory, willing to go further.

They know what neither governmental nor private school lobbyists appear to understand, which is that perfect As are not the only indicator of a promising student. Private-school parents who rage about their child’s grades giving his or her the “right” to a place at Cambridge are just as idiotic as Gordon Brown was when he emoted about Laura Spence failing to get into Magdalen College. A levels are important, but they are not everything. Actually, I think it says a great deal for the bloody-minded originality of our top universities that they are sometimes willing to take a chance on the odd B and C, or conversely to turn down a young person they suspect has been hothoused. In short, I do not think they do too badly.

But even if they were not doing quite so well, it is not the role of ministers — mean, jealous, often ill-educated themselves; desperate for popularity; short on imagination; and keen on cheap class war — to blackmail dedicated (and badly paid) dons into penalising children just because their parents once made a quixotic decision. Why the hell shouldn’t any citizen decide freely to wear old clothes and drive an old car and spend their (taxed) income springing their kids from a school system that has been fiddled and tweaked and bullied into upheaval for twenty years? A system that Martin Stephen, the chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, described yesterday as “like a wound operated on so often that all that is left is scar tissue.”

A bit harsh: much state education is fine, much is growing better. But don’t patronise it — let it prove its worth, and leave the universities alone.

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