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People have spent a long time thinking about university education as basically free. I am not convinced that we can rapidly habituate the British middle classes to paying an awful lot more. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in making the argument.”Higher education experts are impressed. “I think it’s going to be so politically difficult,” he says. “We have to deal with the limits of what middle England will take It’s going to be very, very hard. The papers vanish.”As he talks one gets the feeling that he is seriously interested in his subject and has really got his head around the funding problems of higher education, and the serious political repercussions of moving to a system more like the USA’s, where students and families pay more.His candour is endearing, particularly compared with Tories of old. That feeds into the problem in higher education where you don’t get enough kids doing chemistry The whole thing is an absolute scandal You can’t get hold of exam papers.

You can’t compare A-level exam papers over the past 40 years. That’s not right.”Deftly he moves on to a less politically contentious issue, the fact that students are giving up on difficult subjects such as chemistry and maths. A recent survey showed it was easier to get an A in exams in English or history compared with maths, physics, chemistry or a language.”That’s the real disaster of what’s going on in education,” says Boris. “Teachers and students have a built in incentive to do the softer option. “You do, however, come across cases where people think they have been kept out because they came from a good school. You can’t have discrimination against everybody who’s had a good education.”What does he think about the Government’s performance indicators that check up on the social class and independent school intake of universities, and lead to league tables in the newspapers? Universities dislike them He is careful again.”It seems to be OK so far,” he says.

“I am not in favour of university entrance procedures being used as utensils of social engineering.”You can’t solve at university entrance level all the problems and mistakes in British secondary education. Gordon Brown said this showed how elitist Britain’s top universities were, a charge they vehemently rejected.Does Boris’s reference to Laura Spence mean that he is against widening participation? He answers carefully “I think widening participation is a good thing,” he says. If Gordon wants to demonstrate to middle England and the political classes that he is not going to be some ghastly old socially engineering leftie, he should do a complete U-turn on the universities, drop the Laura Spence nonsense, and announce a programme of much greater liberation. That would be a cool stunt by Gordon.”Laura Spence was the schoolgirl from the Northeast who got a clutch of A grades at A-level from her local comprehensive but failed to win a place to read medicine at Oxford She went off to Harvard. I believe passionately in academic inequality.”There’s a huge amount of good that can be done to liberate universities. “I don’t see any point in constructing great divisions (between Labour and Conservatives) where there are none.”He then tries to think of how he does differ from Labour. “I read a piece by Estelle Morris recently where she said all universities are the same and we should not run away with the idea of too much differentiation,” he recalls “I think ‘absolute bollocks’ These places are not the same.

But it is thin on policy and, as Roger Brown, vice chancellor of Southampton Solent University, points out, its emphasis on more private funding for higher education, less interference with universities and being tougher on standards is not very different from New Labour’s agenda.”I wrote the pamphlet to set out some of the thinking,” he explains. Why do journalists think that higher education is such a lowly portfolio, he asks.”In what sense is higher education a lowly job in politics? It’s not as though it doesn’t absorb my time. I have never worked so hard in all my life.”The new Tory higher education spokesman is whizzing round the country visiting universities and talking to vice chancellors. So far he has been to Leeds, Sheffield, Oxford, Exeter and to various London institutions. Oh, and Edinburgh, where he stood for the position of university rector and was beaten into third place.The only new universities he has visited are Sheffield Hallam, Oxford Brookes and Westminster; he will have to visit more if he is to get a feel for the largest group of universities in the sector educating half a million students.Has he visited any of the newest universities created in the past year, such as Southampton Solent, Worcester and Northampton? Boris looks blank.Nevertheless he has been doing plenty of reading and research, as is evident in his new pamphlet, published by the Conservative think tank Politeia, Aspire Ever Higher: University Policy for the 21st Century.This is an attempt to rework Conservative policy on higher education, which hit rock bottom in the last election when the Tories opposed tuition fees and demanded a cut in student numbers.The pamphlet is well written and funny, as you would expect, full of literary references, quotes from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy written in a country churchyard”, and so on. Appointed by his friend and fellow Oxford graduate, David Cameron, he has brought some welcome fun and games to a world that is not known for its pizzazz.He wants everyone to know that he loves the job and regards it as terrifically important.