Higher education provides one of the enduring mysteries of Tony Blair's 10 years in office. Why, when his mantra of ‘education, education, education’ focused so tightly on schools and nurseries, did he risk the future of his administration on a half-hearted reform of university funding? Whether through misjudgement, stubbornness or genuine radicalism, his proposals for top-up fees came closer than foundation hospitals, trust schools, or even the war in Iraq to bringing a premature end to his premiership.

In his resignation speech at Trimdon Labour Club, Blair recalled the introduction of £3,000 undergraduate tuition fees as ‘deeply controversial and hellish hard to do’ although he insisted that he had been ‘moving with the grain of change around the world’. Yet, for most of his time in office universities took a back seat to more pressing educational concerns, as successive public spending settlements demonstrated. Indeed, the shorthand of ‘schools and hospitals’, used in later years to underline the government's priorities, was probably a more accurate reflection of reality than the more familiar ‘education, education, education’.

Fees were a recurring theme of the Blair years, however. They were high on the new Prime Minister's agenda after the 1997 general election, when the main parties had been happy to ‘park’ the question of how to pay for the much-expanded and increasingly expensive university system by commissioning Sir Ron (subsequently Lord) Dearing to chair a higher education inquiry.