The Sketch: How to lead until 2020: free food for babies; A-levels for all

Several interesting things Gordon Brown revealed to us. You don't expect that in a pre-Budget report.

By 2020, 90 per cent of adults will have five good GCSEs. The one-year-olds of today will grow up to be able to say: "I got two Bs for Enjoying The Day. I failed Responsible Drug Taking, so I got a C for Doing What Nurse Says." Much done on improving exam results, but much yet to do.

What's interesting is that Gordon Brown thinks he may still be Prime Minister in 2020. I don't think he can win more than two elections, can he? Maybe I'm wrong. Free food for babies. A-levels for all. Television and central heating for old people. Expanded "community ownership of community assets". This coalition of "responsible individuals, companies and governments" voting themselves largess from the public purse - it's as close to socialism as the modern world allows.

Another point of interest. The economic cycle was declared over. Its cycle's end was postponed twice and its beginning preponed once. It's a matter of personal choice when the wretched thing starts and finishes.

A third point: he's going to outsource the planning industry. This really is quite interesting. As he said to the House, this making things independent of Government has become quite a theme: monetary policy, financial services policy, competition policy, much of industry policy (and we know he's been thinking of giving the NHS a sort of independence) - and now planning.

When looked at from a great anthropological height, we can see the political class steadily increasing its influence by outsourcing its responsibilities. It is dispersing rather than devolving its power out into the population. All these outsourced commissions and inspectorates and quasi-independent regulators will be heavily influenced by those who appoint them.

Released from operational responsibilities, the Government will project itself more conceptually, up on to some distant, superlunary plane - we won't be able to petition them any more, we will only be able to pray to them.

It's a shift that leaves the Conservatives wallowing down in the slough of administrative detail. George Osborne's (rather good) attack began by referring to a footnote on page 193. That's not where the action is for the Tories. The words "page 193" in a speech are almost as deadly as "seventeenthly..."

No, they're not within grappling distance yet. The Chancellor says: "Money that could be applied to tax cuts will be put into schools and hospitals," and the Tories' answer can't be heard. They haven't failed in this argument because they haven't really tried. Actually, that's not true. They have tried. They have failed.

Because they haven't done the conceptual work, they are still at the Kinnock stage. Maybe Cameron is Kinnock. That wasn't quite revealed in the pre-Budget report, but it may become a consequence of it.

sketch@simoncarr.co.uk