Michael Gove is fed up with the teaching of history. He wants it to be less fictish and more factish. At present he claims British history in schools has the wrong dates, the wrong heroes and hence, I am sure, the wrong lessons drawn. He does not care how history is taught, only what history is taught. I am sure Stalin felt the same. It is the great Govian paradox, a dictatorship of liberty, a free market in doing what we are told.

The idea of ministerial history is ominous. It is like Charles Clarke as home secretary trying to draw up a list of writings to be censored as "glorifying terrorism". If anything gets politicians excited more than telling people what to do, it is telling people what to think.

I want a history syllabus that tells ministers what to think. I want it to list all the relevant kings, dates and accompanying lessons. It would start with my hero, Canute, who explained to his people that rulers cannot do everything expected of them, for instance, telling the tide to turn back. His councillors were unconvinced, and told history he was mad in trying. The first lesson of leadership is, the bastards always get their own back.

William the Conqueror repressed the Saxons by recording and regulating every one of them, every village, field, cow and sheep in the land. The Domesday Book cost a king's ransom, and within half a century England had returned to anarchy. Henry II and Becket showed in 1170 what happens when you allow faith to divide society. One side loses the argument and other loses his head. Magna Carta in 1215 demonstrated that all government survives only by being baronial. De Montfort's parliament in 1264 warned reformers not to run before they could walk.

The hundred years war is a monument to the maxim that British government usually goes potty whenever it crosses the Channel. Henry VIII wisely turned his back on Europe by rejecting the supremacy of Rome in 1534 and privatising the wealth of the monasteries. Tory leaders try but never quite succeed in the former, while Cameron's dissolution of the quangos is done by legislation with aptly named "Henry VIII clauses".

We thought we were rid of the Stuarts' assertion of divine kingship in the 17th century, until Tony Blair asserted that God would be his judge on Iraq. As the nation gasped, he admitted to Roy Jenkins: "I wish I had studied history at university." A brief inquiry into the events of 1649 might well have altered his wording.

The 18th century should weigh heavy on our present guardians. Ministers at least answered for their crimes. When the South Sea bubble burst in 1720, the chief minister, Stanhope, swooned and died in parliament. The postmaster general committed suicide, and the chancellor of the exchequer was thrown into the Tower. The cry went up for bankers to be "tied up in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the murky Thames".

Walpole's foreign policy merits meticulous attention. His quest for ever wider trade and ever more limited military projection yielded four decades of Georgian peace and prosperity. When he was finally goaded by Pitt the Elder's "patriots" into the wretched war of Jenkins' Ear, it brought his downfall. Pitt won Britain an empire, but only at vast cost in defence, which led George III to lose the American colonies by trying to make them pay for it. The empire after which the defence secretary, Liam Fox, and his admirals still hanker, was nothing but expensive.

Pitt the Younger continued with Walpole's isolationism, relenting only when Napoleon declared war on him. After Waterloo, Palmerston remained aloof from foreign disputes until, like Walpole, he was trapped into the Crimean war. Disraeli and Salisbury were equally cautious, until the latter fell foul of the Boer war. Time and again the message echoes down what Gove quaintly calls "our island story". The British army fights best when Britain is threatened, and fights worst when ordered overseas on vanity ventures by politicians desperate to cover themselves in glory.

Given the frequency with which today's pro-war party refers to Hitler and appeasement, it would be useful if the nation stopped for a weekend and received a crash course in distinguishing the "necessary wars" of Elizabeth I, Pitt, Lloyd George and Churchill from the "wars of choice" of Edward III, Walpole, Palmerston and Blair. David Cameron and his foreign secretary, William Hague, see no difference. That is why they are stuck in the deserts of Afghanistan, their ears blocked to history.

George Osborne should spend time studying the "Geddes axe" of 1922, the Snowden cuts of 1931 and Margaret Thatcher's failure to streamline social benefits (merely cutting "planned increases") in 1980-81. All are rich in lessons. Liberals contemplating a coalition election deal should examine Lloyd George's "coupon election" of 1918 or the coalition of 1931. Terrible things always happen to parties that get into bed with Tories.

Politicians ought to study past folly as a doctor studies past diseases or a lawyer studies past judgments. They should read the history of taxation. They should look into Neville Chamberlain's means tests, to see what ensues when central bureaucracy replaces local discretion in welfare. Gove might usefully read of the politics of the 1944 Education Act, and note how 11-plus selection was such an electoral disaster that even Thatcher as education secretary dared not revert to it.

Andrew Lansley might equally examine the war between Bevan and Morrison in 1946-47 over whether the new NHS should be local or national. By ignoring its lessons, Thatcher was condemned to re-fight it in her "purchaser/provider" reform of 1989, as did Blair in 2006 and Lansley now. Nothing is new when governments court folly.

Even Gove is a slave to ignorance of the past. His cry that English, maths and science are the subjects "most critical to our economic future" parrots the subject lobbies of the 1980s, when ministers were still terrified by Soviet scientific advance – an advance which did the Russians no good by ignoring economics and politics.

In his essay on the Victorian educationist Thomas Arnold, Lytton Strachey ridiculed a curriculum that was "rooted in the ancients". At the time, Arnold was insisting that Latin and Greek were the proper training for a gentleman. This was when school systems across Europe were moving to science and technology, much to the benefit of domestic industries. Today, British ministers are discovering science and technology just when the labour market is moving towards services, requiring economics, business, administration and law. No one talks of making them core subjects, or their underpinning study of history.

Tories have always liked facts – dates, places, weights and measures — because they brook no argument from sceptics and leftwingers. They are "academic", intellectual authority on stilts. But history's facts are deliciously dangerous. Set them going and they race to conclusions. That is why a history lesson for ministers might be a lesson of advantage to us all.