I was 22 years old. And I was giving a speech to a bunch of social democrats above a pub somewhere. As one does. I can't remember what I was talking about, but at some point I made a disparaging joke about morris dancers.

When I had finished, an old man at the back slowly rose and began addressing me. As he talked, he walked to the front and by the time he finished, he was inches from me, wagging his finger. He was, he explained, a morris dancer. He got a great deal of pleasure from it and so did many others. “You're a good lad,” he concluded. “But you've got a lot to learn.”

He was right. About having a lot to learn, I mean. Well, he'll be pleased to know that I did finally learn the lesson he was trying to teach me - but perhaps less impressed that it took me ten years. It wasn't until the Tory MP John Blackburn died in October 1994 that I properly understood what my morris-dancing friend had been trying to tell me.

Mr Blackburn's death caused a vacancy in his seat of Dudley West, and his party faced a difficult task trying to hold it. One Tory tactic was to promise tax cuts. But there was a problem making promises of any kind in this by-election. And that problem was Ken Clarke, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

You see, fed up with being pressed to honour promises made by other ministers, Mr Clarke had, some time before Blackburn's death, responded with a typically dismissive joke. He wouldn't be bound, he said with one of his little laughs, by something someone happened to say “on a wet night in Dudley”. As he later ruefully acknowledged, this may have amused other people, but it went down very badly in Dudley. Which didn't much matter at first. But then Dudley had a by-election.

What the usually adept Mr Clarke had temporarily forgotten when he made his Dudley comment was the same thing I had to learn when I taked about morris dancers. Dudley is a real place and real people live there. Real people, perfectly nice, pleasant people, enjoy morris dancing. There is no such thing as a joke category of citizens, a whole occupation, an entire location, that can be pilloried without any single individual regarding the comment as being about them.

I'll explain why I am telling you all this. A couple of weeks back David Cameron made a rather good speech on the need to curb public spending. Not long after it started, he made mention of the fact that Labour had spent £2.3 billion refurbishing the offices of the Ministry of Defence. This, he said, was “more than they take in one year from air passenger duty. So next time you're in your airline seat, just be grateful you've helped buy a comfy new chair for some bureaucrat.”

Now £2.3 billion is a baffling, almost incredible, figure. What on earth were they doing? And Mr Cameron is correct about the comfy chairs, too. They bought office chairs with a retail price of £1,000. I didn't object to holding these extraordinary sums up for scrutiny. What caught my eye, was the reference to “some bureaucrat”.

Now the MoD did not buy absurd, wasteful, unjustified, ridiculously expensive chairs for “some bureaucrat”. They bought absurd, wasteful, unjustified, ridiculously expensive chairs for hard-working state employees carrying out tasks that they have been set by a democratically elected government. Real people, these “bureaucrats”, you see. Maybe some of them live in Dudley and go morris dancing.

This may seem a minor point. But I think that if the Conservatives want to succeed in reshaping the State and curbing public spending they should not see it as a minor point at all.

To start with, there is a tendency on the Right (this was a relatively rare lapse from Mr Cameron himself) to be discourteous in referring to public servants, as if all were useless, unnecessary and seated on excessively padded furniture.

Nurses are usually exempted, of course. But pretty much everyone else is folded in when the general, often rather casual, critical remarks are made. And these people will, if the Tories win, be managed by them as members of staff. There is no chance of finding or making efficiency gains unless the staff are motivated to help. And no chance of attracting good people to join a staff that even its managers are rude about. The correct approach of any party that seeks to govern should be great courtesy.

After all, it is the politicians and the voters who made the decisions, spent the money and set the incentives under which these “bureaucrats” operate. It is we who have almost bankrupted the country. Not the public servants. They were, in the main, doing what they were told, or, at the very least, what we allowed them to do.

The way that Tories address public servants also matters because of human psychology. Plenty of research shows how we construct our identity by looking around at our peers and trying to fit in with them. We are hungry for clues about how to behave. People copy each other, even, bizarrely enough, copying each others' suicides. That is why unfunny television shows use canned laughter. So when public servants are told that generally they stand in the way of reform, or that they are “bureaucrats” pushing paper, their reaction will be to adopt this as their identity. Being an anti-reformist paper-pusher will become the norm to which public servants adapt. The right language is to normalise the reformers, to talk of public servants as allies in the task.

The final problem with the talk of “bureaucrats” is that it makes reforming the State seem much easier than it is, and therefore makes the arguments harder to win. It suggests that there is plenty of money being spent that has literally no value to the public at all. Of course, there is some. But the scale of the reductions needed to cut the Government's debts mean the State will have to stop doing things that do have value, but not enough to be worth the money being spent.

Yesterday's news that the creation of a state register of private landlords is being considered is a good example. This is a scheme that has something to be said for it. It might do some good. But I very much doubt that it will do enough good to be worth the time or the money, considering how strapped we are for both. Voters will be unwilling to see such marginal schemes cut if they are told that they are able to save all the money needed by “axing pen-pushing bureaucrats” doing nothing worthwhile at all.

Winning the argument on public spending involves persuading voters to do without things that they might want the State to do. It will not be enough to purchase chairs for a more reasonable price. Although I have to admit that it would certainly be a good start.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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