Warning: This sketch may damage your health

Tuesday, 1 December 2009 12:00 AM

You can forget speeches about weighty foreign policy or the perilous public finances. There's nothing that puts a spring into David Cameron's step like the prospect of a health and safety speech.

By Alex Stevenson

The leader of the opposition positively bounded into the room as he prepared to rip to shreds "obsessed" Labour's love affair with micromanagement. It was as if his aides were literally holding him back. If there was ever a man who seconds before had been straining at the leash, the Cameron that sprang into the room was he.

There was no mistaking the glint in his eye. "I'm disappointed you didn't start the speech by pointing out the fire exits," he told his introducer, to guffaws of right-wing laughter. He did that funny little hand gesture only usually seen in airline safety demonstrations (and the more garish of Britain's night-time establishments). This was a man who knew he had something juicy up his sleeve.

Cameron, it turns out, is against "tick-box bureaucracy". His speech certainly ticked all the Tory boxes. He offered an "empowerment agenda", which taken by itself is impossible to oppose. He wanted to see more "personal responsibility", like everyone who has ever voted Conservative in history. And he said existing health and safety rules flew "in the face of common sense". If there's one thing the Tories are for, it's common sense!

No decent red-blooded Conservative could be reasonably expected to listen to this without getting thoroughly worked up. The audience were lapping it up.

"The thicker the handbooks, the longer and more tedious the training days, the sillier the rules," Cameron lamented. Broken Britain was being sucked up in a vicious circle, a bureaucratic whirlpool of calamity. Will the last person to leave Britain please turn off the taps?

There is something so reassuringly home counties about the huffing and puffing against health and safety, a sort of complaints comfort blanket for the middle classes, that the Tories can't help but get worked up about it.

Just around the corner Sir John Chilcot's Iraq inquiry was taking place. Very grave matters about Britain's role in the 2003 invasion were being ruminated on. Civil servants, ambassadors and military men were carefully pondering Britain's role in the world.

Cameron, who hopes to assume control of the nuclear codes after the next election, was telling his fans: "It is time that we rid our country of those ludicrous warning notices stating the completely blindingly obvious!"

And, later: "I think even donkeys, a zebra - they have to go into a photo booth and have their photo taken!"

It was, this writer humbly suggests, not his finest hour.

But he had not yet had his fill. "Understandable anger" at the health and safety travesties of New Labour had to be translated into solutions. Cameron, infected by his own enthusiasm, couldn't help but go a little too far.

"You need ministers going in and saying, not what law can we make today, but what law can we repeal today?" he asked rhetorically at one stage. We've already been promised a bonfire of the quangos. Now a bonfire of the statutes seems on the cards too.

Before much longer, it seemed, the leader of the opposition was in danger of proposing abolishing the government altogether. Perhaps he realised he had been overcome by the heady cocktail of all that slashing and burning.

There is only one antidote, one sobering option available: retreating to Blairite management nonsense.

" More transparency about results will enable you to stand back on bureaucracy," Cameron said in response to one question. The audience looked as disappointed as they did baffled. He tried again.

"Let's stop trying to measure and manage every process, but start to measure the outcome." Again, looks of confusion.

So Cameron told it like it is, or, rather, like he wants it to be. "If the school is performing well, back off!"

Let the latest Tory bonfire begin.

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