Michael Gove v Ed Balls? It's Squeaker v Seether

Michael Gove against Ed Balls is a magnificent debate between a very quick squeaker and a huge but silent snarl

Gove versus Balls – what a magnificent fight! The winner of the Mrs Grabbitas Prize for Debating up against the school bully.

Mr Gove doesn't just speak, he squeaks. You can't call it gabbling because he enunciates every word, but very quickly. Half a second, squirted down a phone line to his spymasters, could be extended with the right equipment into an entire speech. "Tovarich, standards in British schools have fallen disastrously over the past 13 years. The Kremlin must know this!"

Ed Balls cannot bear to sit there and take it. So he has developed a line in ultra-expressive face and body language. His face was rigid. The eyebrows hooded. The mouth half open, as if frozen on its way towards a Munch-style scream. The effect is of a huge but silent snarl.

Now and again he shook his head in despair, rather like the rest of us do while watching The Weakest Link and a contestant, asked which "B" is a yellow fruit, replies: "Beetroot". Or he flares his nostrils, and when the Balls nostrils are dilated, they stay dilated. If the wind changed, he would go through life looking like a very peevish horse. Sometimes he hugged his knees, as if afraid that, unhugged, his legs would break free and would randomly kick everyone in sight.

The Labour opposition to the academies bill is based on the fear that they will be, in effect, privatised schools that will solidify middle-class privilege and draw money away from more needy pupils. Already, they say, the 700 schools that are not now getting new buildings have been deprived of cash meant for this dogmatic Tory theory. They have been helped by the fact that, so far, we are told, only 50 schools have applied for academy status, whereas Mr Gove said that 2,000 were interested.

This is like saying that all the 2,000 people who accepted one of those cheap phone cards handed out on the streets have a burning desire to call Botswana. It's the difference between a vague interest and a fixed determination.

Mr Gove had to pull out all his debating prize skills. He was only, he said, extending what Tony Blair tried to do in 2005. "He wanted every school to have academy status… All I see on the Opposition benches are people who have betrayed the Messiah, or at least the former prime minister, and now that the cock has crowed three times ... "

As they say on the New Yorker, block that metaphor!

Ed Balls got his chance to reply, which he did by accepting every intervention from Tories and Lib Dems. This enabled him to have a running fight with several people at once, like a chess grandmaster playing a dozen games simultaneously, except that he doesn't move the pieces but overturns the boards. He bellowed: "The cost of 'free' schools is going to come from cuts to all other schools!"

So enraged was he that he hurled down each sheet of his speech at random as if fury had deprived him of motor coordination. But of course he is running for leader of the Labour party, on a platform of being never knowingly out-seethed.

Up in Liverpool, David Cameron was launching the "big society", surely the vaguest slogan ever coined by a political leader. Nobody knows what it means. Should we take turns to police the streets: "the pig society"? Or is it a tribute to Fabricant – "the wig society"? None of us can know.

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