GORDON Brown’s passion for weakening the iron grip of the rich and powerful on the country’s top jobs rings true, but he is ducking the key issue.

This week, the Prime Minister vowed to unleash the “biggest wave of social mobility since the Second World War” by opening up the “closed shop” professions – law, politics, business, medicine, academia and the media.

The scandal is tiresomely familiar. Just seven per cent of youngsters attend private schools – yet those pupils account for 75 per cent of judges, 70 per cent of finance directors, 32 per cent of MPs… Real action was promised. A commission to turn the screw on the professions, help for 130,000 of the “brightest”, but poorest, youngsters, 1,000 university scholarships for apprentices.

The package delighted Darlington MP Alan Milburn whose investigation warned that his “council house to the Cabinet” triumph was now near-impossible to repeat.

So why do I fear this crusade will merely tinker at the edges of Britain’s stark class divide?

Because it said so little about schools.

Little will change until clever-but-poor pupils can attend a school where they have a real chance of grabbing a place at a top university – and, then, of grabbing a top job.

Mr Milburn’s solution was to give “vouchers”

to children stuck in “ghettos of disadvantage”

which they could “spend” on switching to a successful school.

These vouchers would be worth 50 per cent more than the cost of an education, giving thriving schools a powerful incentive to accept pupils from poorer areas.

Well, Mr Brown ignored that idea altogether – probably because it smells like Tory policy and because he had previously condemned it, warning that weaker schools would “go under”.

Now, I believe the Prime Minister is correct to fear that Mr Milburn’s plan would further widen the frightening divide between good and bad schools – while leaving the power of private schools untouched. But where is his alternative?

The aim should be a genuine mix of abilities at every school so that every pupil has talented peers to look up to. That means making every school popular with parents.

So how about a proposal to force the elite universities to guarantee a fixed proportion of places to the most able pupils – perhaps the top two per cent – from every school?

A student would have an equal chance of going to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, etc, regardless of whether they attended Eton or a Middlesbrough comprehensive.

They would just need to get into the top two per cent.

The super-rich would be free to spend their fortunes on school fees – but their children would no longer get an unfair passport to the top jobs.

Social mobility in action. Dangerously leftwing, you say? Not so, according to journalist Peter Wilby who proposes it – pointing out that a version is up and running in go-getting California and redneck Texas.

NICE to see Lord Bates, the Conservative deputy chairman and ex-Langbaurgh MP, sitting in on this week’s investigation into the Corus crisis by the new North-East Select Committee.

Hang on, though. Didn’t the Tories boycott regional select committees, condemning them as “a complete waste of time”?

David Cameron won’t brand Lord Bates a blackleg – will he?