The Sketch: Simon Carr

Watch out, Prime Minister - your local loop's unbundling at both ends

A merchant bank was giving away free gifts outside the hall where the Prime Minister was making a speech to the Confederation of British Industry. Balls. Lots of balls. I took one, even though there'd been more than enough balls in the conference hall.

The Prime Minister is looking tired. Late nights, a fractious coalition, a war. There he was on a purple set in Birmingham, concentrating on the need "to advance broadband in Britain" by "driving forward local loop unbundling". Attack jets. Cruise missiles. He has to try to make sense of the words. "We are seeking to encourage innovation with the R&D tax credit, initially for small firms, which we are now consulting on extending."

God, but these speeches are boring. They aren't speeches at all, in fact – they're an accumulation of the bullet-point minutes from a government sub-committee that has been charged with generating good news.

It never seems fair to accuse the Prime Minister of dishonesty, nice young man that he is. But his techniques of evasion were starting to show through. In the matter of tax cuts (the Confederation of British Industry is generally in favour of such things) "short-term tax cuts" were undesirable, "but that's not to say where it's possible to reduce taxes, we should". In other words, no tax cuts, except when we have tax cuts.

He's been tired before. Towards the end of the parliamentary session he gets frazzled, absent-minded. Normally that's a matter for comic observation by nasty commentators. Now that he's got his finger on the nuclear button, and the weapons are armed, it's not quite the laughing matter it was.

Yesterday he seemed not only tired but out of his depth. Maybe the confederation's members sensed it because they didn't appear keen to take up his offer to ask questions. Eight-odd came from the floor, supplemented by another two from the platform.

And he was answering in a rambling mumble that made John Prescott sound like Bamber Gascoigne. One member wondered what relief the Government could provide the manufacturing sector in the "two-speed economy" that had developed.

The Prime Minister responded, in a statement that was good enough to have been given away by a merchant bank, that manufacturers "said it was the currency fluctuation that was the problem"; then he informed us that the single most important thing that manufacturing needed was stability. No. Manufacturers do say stability is the problem – the implacably stable level of sterling.

"I mean obviously, when we talk about the two-speed economy, we should be grateful for the fact that consumers are still spending. And we believe that it's important that they do spend."

There was more of this, but my tape recorder just gave up and refused to record any more.

It's all taking its toll. One policy after another, one initiative after another, one target, another ambition. It was like pushing blancmange around a plate.

The Prime Minister talked of the need "to make a fundamental change to the way that decisions are made in Europe".

That sounded even madder than the new world order that he unveiled at the Labour Party conference. All we need to do is just get some good-hearted people together without prejudice, and we'll fundamentally change the way that the European Union makes its decisions. Ha! And I'm Fanny Burney's bog brush.

I withdraw that. I'm no such thing. It's a remark that belongs in a box along with that merchant bank's free gifts and the Prime Minister's speech.