Name your poison

Education and employment secretary David Blunkett and higher education minister Tessa Blackstone, are understood to be determined to pursue their own ideas on funding if they don't like Dearing's recommendations.

Blunkett's hard line may have something to do with his feelings about the membership of the committee. Many of his own nominations for committee members were rejected. The last word on the make-up of the committee came from Downing Street's policy unit, at the time a hotbed of right-wing Conservatives, not from the DFEE.