He’s a right old stirrer, that Michael Gove. Fresh from appearing on the cover of Tes as if to troll the teaching profession who thought they’d got rid of him once and for all, he’s at it again.

This time he’s out to settle another score with another former education secretary - Lord Baker. It’s an open secret that there’s little love lost between the two Tories. Not least when it comes to the thorny issue of university technical colleges (UTCs).

As Lord B told Tes in November, support for the expansion of the UTC movement under the Coalition was certainly not supported by Gove, who - unlike David Cameron and George Osborne - “didn’t like them”.

Back in February, more examples of UTC failures tempted Gove out of the woodwork to write a sniping article for The Times, concluding that “the evidence has accumulated and the verdict is clear” on the troubled 14-19 institutions.

It’s an open secret that there’s little love lost between the two Tories

“Twice as many UTCs are ‘inadequate’ as ‘outstanding’,” he continued. “UTC pupils have lower GCSE scores, make less progress academically and acquire fewer qualifications than their contemporaries in comprehensives.”

Predictably, the battle-hardened 82-year-old hit back quickly and robustly. “Gove now presents himself as a former champion of UTCs so that he can ‘admit’ that they have failed. But from the beginning his embrace of them of was that an undertaker,” Lord Baker wrote.

Now Gove has weighed in by using a parliamentary question to ascertain exactly how much of tax-payers’ hard-earned cash has been channelled off to the Baker Dearing Trust, the charity he founded with the late Lord Dearing to promote the UTC mission.

The government response (from Gove’s former underling Nick Gibb, who has become part of the furniture at the DfE) revealed that the trust has been paid over £500,000 by the Department over the last three years.

The government “funds this work through a competitively tendered grant award”, Gibb added; the trust provides “advice, guidance and pre-approval support” to groups setting up UTCs.

Still, it sounds like an awful lot of money. Especially when we’ve already seen seven UTCs announce their closure. After the latest round of this blue-on-blue scrap, FErret makes that Gove 2, Baker 1.

Share your gossip, scandal and intrigue with FErret by emailing ferret@tesglobal.com