Far from being the unexpected U-turn trumpeted by Damian Green, the Tory education spokesman, this is what ministers have wanted for years - although they would hardly have chosen this chaotic and politically dangerous route to get there.

One of the reasons for the speed at which the shambolic ASA2 system was devised, and the decision to ignore warnings that more time was needed to sort out deep-seated problems, was the fact that the new exam was going to be temporary.

It was a timid step towards the five or six subject 18-plus exam which the first Blair government funked - for fear of Chris Woodhead and the public school headmasters.

But the people for whom this half-way house really mattered - teachers, parents, and above all students - were not let in on the secret. They saw it as permanent, and highly significant to the future of hundreds of thousands of young people.

There has already been a great deal of distressing fall-out. As I write, it’s not clear whether Bill Stubbs, previously thought to be the safest pair of hands in the country, is going to survive. Ken Boston, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s new chief, has made a terrible start to his job by blaming the teachers - and not any old teachers. We’re used to that.

But he dared to suggest that teachers at crack public schools hadn’t understood what was required by an examination.

University entrance is in chaos, and some deserving candidates have lost their places. This year’s AS candidates (including my own daughter) may have been marked down as a defensive measure for next year. But on this aspect of the furore, my views seem to be somewhat heretical.

Of course our assessment system should be as fair as we can reasonably make it, but is it really a national disaster if a number of young people have to make do with places at Leeds or Exeter, say, instead of Oxbridge?

After all, for every disappointment there will have been a celebration in a different household, where someone else got a place instead. Do we know that these lucky ones were all undeserving?

For me, one of the most mystifying aspects of the whole sorry affair is why the dawning realisation that the A-levels results were going to be disproportionately good should have elicited such panic. The Government has a huge majority, and we are three years away from the next election.

Surely someone should have had the brains and bottle to construct a robust defence of the results, complete with good reasons as to why they were so much improved. Most importantly, this is the first cohort to go right through the national curriculum - put in place by the Tories. Wasn’t this measure supposed to improve education and raise standards?

If the reason for such alarm was that the design of the entire marking system - going back to the first AS results received in March 2001 - was irretrievably flawed, and that this was not realised until the final week of July 2002, then the people responsible for such a catastrophe should indeed be sacked (though not, I think, Estelle Morris), and the sooner we move to a baccalaureate-type examination the better. The Scots seem to have rather a good one.

Caroline St John-Brooks is a former editor of The TES