The Sketch: So let us all be taxed to kingdom come and charmed along the way

With Edwina Currie's purple passages (and it's best if you don't think about that image too carefully) still featuring so much in the media, that makes an interesting indicator of how much the Tories are still hated.

Bill Clinton, whose private life has been very considerably deeper purple than John Major's, was received rapturously and without reserve by Labour.

At the party last night, yelping women were practically throwing their hotel keys at him. He caught the eye of a perfectly respectable woman on the stairs and sucked her phone number straight out of her brain. She felt it happening. So did I, and I was standing three down from her. Extraordinary man.

We remembered the senior female Democrat who sought to excuse her President by saying: "There's a little bit of Clinton in all of us." She – and they – could only hope.

The Sketch has no time for essentially frivolous occasions. It stumbled off to see Alan Milburn addressing a fringe health meeting half-way down the promenade.

He's a very important man, Mr Milburn. Maybe he'll be more important. If the succession jumps Gordon Brown (and stranger things have happened), he's the most plausible candidate for leader. He's horribly young (I hate that). He's got the best hair in the cabinet. He doesn't speak that ugly, alien language that only administrators understand. He doesn't use notes.

The impression he does of a normal person is quite convincing. And he seems to be surviving in the National Health Service.

You can't expect him to succeed in reforming the service (please don't accuse me of Tory pessimism) but political success in the NHS means getting out alive. Maybe he'll do that too.

How did this future leader perform down there on the fringes? Perfectly all right is the rather dull answer. He told us about choice and putting patients first and setting hospitals free and all sorts of other Tory ideas that Tories can't say for themselves. Lefties can take hope from the fact, the certainty that these ideas will never really get off the ground.

How can one be sure? "We have to change the culture of the NHS," he said. That's always a giveaway. When you have to change the whole culture of an institution it means you're failing and will continue to fail. You can only change the culture by changing the incentives. Privatisation changes the incentives, and not even the Tories are prepared to privatise the NHS.

And secondly, as one of the panel pointed out, if you set the service free, inequalities will increase (it's what freedom means). "We'll have to look at that," Mr Milburn agreed. It's possible he hasn't thought it through. They don't always think things through, as Estelle Morris has so obligingly demonstrated for us.

If these people have to choose between equality and freedom they clutch instinctively at the panoply of state powers with which they think they can enforce equality. We end up being neither free nor equal, but they get re-elected which is the point all along.

All we can hope is to be taxed to kingdom come, and if we're lucky, charmed along the way. And that's where Mr Milburn comes in.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com