AS HE finally starts losing his grip on reality, Gordon Brown says he might become a teacher when he is eventually dislodged from Downing Street.

Ain’t it always the way? Those who can, teach. But unfortunately, those who can’t do anything else also seem fatally attracted to this profession.

I am not one of those who believes teachers should have spent half their lives in industry or the so-called “real world”.

We don’t expect brain surgeons to have worked as brickies, or barristers to have been bus conductors, so why pick on teachers for merely following what should be a vocational work-path from the day they leave college?

But too many don’t, do they?

For far too many of them, the motto appears to be: if all else fails, teach.

A few years back I spent one of the most tedious evenings of my life listening to some drunken, middle-aged loser telling me that now his business had failed, and his attempts to get a well-paid job had failed, he was going to go into teaching.

Why? Because he felt he could make a success of that and unlike the teachers, he had lived in the “real world”.

I think Gordon Brown’s a bit like this.

The idea of him teaching is frankly ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that he’ll ever sort this country out or mend his ways.

He keeps promising “trans-peer-ancy” and less than a week later we get a list of MPs’ expenses that looked like the blackout, we have an Iraq inquiry that was going to be held in secret and we have natio-nalised bank bosses who are raking it in like the financial crash never happened.

That kind of experience schools can do without.

Just to remind Gordon and anyone else failing in their career; many schools have quite enough problems with inadequate, demoralised staff and leadership who don’t have a clue what they are doing.

The last thing they need is more of the same.