It was a lesson in humility yesterday morning for Alastair Campbell. The girls of St Marylebone Church of England High School in London had just awarded Tony Blair’s chief spin-doctor seven out of ten for his attempt at teaching them English. Their own teacher scored ten.

As supply teachers go, Mr Campbell was remarkably well prepared. His lesson — a deconstruction of President-elect Obama’s victory oration — included footage of the speech, which he played after giving a run-through of the rhetorical devices used in it.

It was just as well that Mr Campbell had done his homework. The school’s Ofsted report describes it as an “extraordinary” place, thanks partly to the “rigorous planning” that goes into every lesson. The 15 and 16-year-old girls were going to be a tough crowd.

He tried, and failed, to win them round with a bribe — the student who produced the best work would be awarded a signed copy of his debut novel, All in the Mind, nominated recently for a Literary Review Bad Sex Award for a steamy park-bench scene.

Mr Campbell was there to promote the work of Teach First with eight other personalities, including Christine Ohuruogu, the Olympic gold medallist, Darren Campbell, the athlete turned football coach, and Baroness Warsi, the Tory spokeswoman for Community Cohesion and Social Action. The Teach First initiative places high-calibre graduates into some of England’s most challenging schools for two years.

Mr Campbell has taught before, having spent a year in France as an English assistant during his degree course. But he admitted that he was far too impatient to be any good at it. Last year he took a class in political communications at the London School of Economics with Philip Gould, Tony Blair’s pollster. But his school experience was 30 years ago, long before the advent of the interactive whiteboard, which proved a little beyond his technical skills yesterday. This forced him to rely on the class’s English teacher, Ella Pilc, to do it for him. Miss Pilc’s reward, however, was humiliation. “I’m just going to correct your teacher’s spelling,” Mr Campbell told the class after she had kindly written a summary of his lesson plan on to the board.

As an insight into the speechwriter’s art, Mr Campbell’s lesson was exemplary. He explained the “tricolon technique”, where a sentence is divided into three parts, like Julius Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici (“I came. I saw, I conquered”). Mr Obama’s use of this may soon start to irritate audiences, suggested the man behind Tony Blair’s 1997 promise to make “education, education, education” his top priority.

He highlighted Mr Obama’s use of the “epiphora”, the repetition of the same words at the end of sentences (in Mr Obama’s case, it was “Yes we can”), that he described as being “like a riff at the end of the line in hip-hop”.

The pupils liked their new teacher, but thought he spoke too much. Amelie Eckersley, 16, said: “It was refreshing. But we did do a lot of listening.” Eleanor Webb Brown, 16, using a rhetorical device known as damning with faint praise, was more to the point. “It’s great to have a lesson where all you have to do is sit down.”

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