Simon Carr: The Sketch

What a touch he has, the Prime Minister. How deft he is. He brought along his double-barrelled aide Benjamin Wegg-Prosser to work the display board. It takes confidence in these degraded times to hire anyone called Wegg-Prosser, let alone describe him as "my gorgeous assistant".

Weggy puckered up, tossed his hair, cocked his hip, flashed his fishnet-clad thighs (I'm not quite sure when my imagination took over) and held up the hat out of which the Prime Minister pulled his rabbits.

The health service statistics are indeed very impressive. And if they're true they're even more impressive. But the most impressive thing about them is how little people believe them. Why is this? Is it the media's fault? It might be.

"A problem is either a crisis or a catastrophe and if it isn't a crisis or a catastrophe it doesn't exist," he said.

That's an elegant way of putting it, so elegant it must have some truth in it. But then, the public believe what they read in newspapers only a very little bit more than they believe what politicians say, so it balances out in the end.

On some strange, "wisdom of crowds" principle, the heedless multitude get many things dead right without knowing a blind thing about them. The Hutton verdict, the current Conservative Party and attitudes to the NHS are three examples.

The Independent asked him whether he thought his legacy would be the most authoritarian government in recent history. He had no answer to that. Instead he pulled the hat from gorgeous, pouting Weggy's hands and started pulling out frightened pensioners, drug dealers, international terrorists to amaze us. He always goes off on these tangents when you ask him about liberty.

On the House of Lords, however, he said something that made me feel quite ... protective of him. He was asked whether he was inclining more to the idea of an elected second chamber. He became steely. He refused to answer. He said he'd become more open-minded on the issue. He'd let us know when he'd made his mind up. Asked about his reluctance to tell us now, he said: "The more you think about it, you realise how many extremely difficult questions there are to answer."

This is the first time in living memory that Tony Blair has been less than omniscient. Hayek would have been delighted with his reply. This new caution suggests an evolution in the Prime Minister's character. He might even come to the conclusion that the Lords is doing perfectly well as it is, and that complacency is the answer.

Finally he said, as he has often said: "Nobody is talking about attacking Iran." They are, of course, all over the place. He concluded: "Iran is not Iraq." Or was it the other way round? It sounded pretty implausible either way.

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