I heard the Prime Minister on Sunday telling Andrew Marr: “I am listening to what people have said; I have heard what people have said,” and I thought: “Oh bugger.” And this is why.

The idea of listening is, of course, part of the necessary rubric of political discourse, but it is either a polite hypocrisy, because modern politicians are always horribly tuned in to what voters say (unless one imagines the PM or the Leader of the Opposition sitting in the basement of No 10 or in Notting Hill, with his hands over his ears going “lah, lah, lah”) or else it's code for something else entirely.

Interviewers love the listening moment, because it provides a reliable skewer. The troubled minister turns up for his kebabbing, attempting the impossible task of justifying both his own past actions while not criticising the electorate that is so angry about them. “Are you now listening?” demands the interlocutor. If no, the politician is a monster. If yes, that obviously means he wasn't listening before, and has just recently been a monster. And if he has listened, then what is he going to do now that he wasn't doing before? What will he change?

This is a problem if, by and large, you (the politician) think you've been doing the correct things. Of course, you mess stuff up from time to time, so you could promise to be a bit more careful and hope to be a tad more lucky - but that's clearly not enough. So “listening” instead becomes a way of saying that you will now - in the interests of saving your skin from disaster - mollify a section of voters by stopping doing the right thing, or starting doing the wrong one.

A footnote here: one interviewing trope is to ignore any of the virtues of what the politician is saying, and simply to trump him with “but you've been pursuing that policy for years and the voters have still given you a bloody nose”. This move is cheap, reliable, involves no research and puts pressure on the interviewee to come up with some novelty or other, as though politics were as much about entertainment as about running things. Which, after Thursday's London edition of I'm a Celebrity, Put Me In Here, might now be true.

Something, it is agreed, needs to be done, and there are any number of snake oil salesmen who have ridden their garish wagons on to Labour's battered Main Street and are now busy shouting their wares. In a way it's worse than the Old West, for these purveyors of remedies for baldness at one end and flatulence at the other actually believed that their patent worked. Will you just admire, for the minute, the brio of those around the Compass group who believe a Tory advance is best contained by promising tax rises and curtailing choice.

But worse even than the Great Marvo's Medicinal Omnicure is what gets promised to the voters as a consequence of “listening”. A few weeks ago I wrote on this page about the constant demand that we subsidise the Post Office network to an even greater extent than the Government is already planning. An impassioned letter in yesterday's paper said that we should no longer consider a Post Office deficit to be a “loss” but rather a “cost”, like health or education. But schools and the NHS are practically universal services, whereas a growing number of us, for a series of reasons, choose not to use our post offices. That reality gap can only grow, so it seems reasonable to expect that an incoming Conservative government, whatever its current stance, will not reverse the closure programme. When in power it will stop listening, and that's probably a good job too.

It is hardly ideal, though, when one has to rely on politicians not doing what they promise - but consider the alternative. Some polling and much anecdotal evidence suggest a degree of irritation with government plans to reward green behaviour and to “disincentivise” wastefulness and pollution. The problem here is straightforward - environmental degradation often takes time to occur, and isn't linked in an obvious visual way to the actions that cause it. In other words, the unimaginative citizen - often older and with less of a stake in the long term - feels badgered about a possible outcome that seems speculative. Why should I be penalised for driving a bloody great super-emitting automobile or for shoving eight tonnes of rubbish in front of my house every morning, like I always have?

The answer, of course, is that your petrol emissions and your rubbish all go somewhere. They do not drop off the edge of the planet into a council- run black hole once they have been collected or emitted. We're running out of landfill, and the very same people who moan at bin taxes will also moan at incinerators being sited anywhere near Dunthinkin.

But a “listening” politician is one, I submit, who decides that discretion is the better part of valour, and dumps the bin tax. “Listening” is always short-term, because who's shouting about 2020? Dispiritingly, in the US, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain are arguing for a moratorium on federal fuel tax for the summer holiday season, encouraging Americans to get into their huge vehicles and forget about the small problems of oil shortages and emissions. They have both decided to “listen”.

The funny thing is that I don't think it's what we really want. If I know that the reassurance I seek is being given purely to reassure me, then - if I am sensible - I am unreassured. If a politician “listens” to me and then decides to do what I want, and not what she thinks is best, that is not really what I pay my taxes for.

Take this column. I can generally expect that a piece like this, which hints at sympathy for politicians, will generate comments on The Times website running three to one against me. So next week imagine that, chastened by the hostility, I were to begin with: “I have been listening. And, in order to please those decent readers made irate by my suggestion that modern Britain is not a Luciferian inferno, I have decided to write that things are every bit as bad as the Daily Mail says they are. I hope you will appreciate the change.”

I think, and I hope, that you would feel as uncomfortable and as cheated as you should when a politician is forced to tell you he is listening to you.

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