I feel sorry for Gordon Brown. It is one thing to be accused of tax fiddling, dodgy borrowing and cowardice, but to be called cold, unfriendly and not nice is going too far. The poor man was reduced on radio last week to pleading that he did have a wife and children (as opposed to puff adders). But then, most of us would rather be called a villain than a schmuck.

Worse, while Brown the politician is depicted as a desiccated calculating machine, his imminent forebear, Tony Blair, is displayed as a jolly, smiling, hail-fellow-well-met bloke next door. While Gordon would wrench your guts for garters, Tony would have his arm round your neck weeping. When David Cameron, the Tory leader, said last week, “They have taken the heart out of the NHS and replaced it with a computer”, it was code for they have taken out Tony and replaced him with Gordon.

Cameron’s line would be a winner if he only knew what to do with it. He has hit on what is emerging as a deep divide between approaches to Britain’s public services. The divide is not Brown from Blair, or even Labour from Conservative, since Blair’s public sector is in direct line of descent from Margaret Thatcher’s, as Brown’s Treasury is from that of Nigel Lawson and Kenneth Clarke. The difference is between modern government as fashioned by Westminster ministers and officials since the late 1980s and whatever may be implied by Cameron’s obscure reference to “heart”.

One thing is for sure: the present model is not working. As Adam Curtis sets out in his current television series The Trap, a tradition of the public realm once built round autonomous institutions, elected leaders and public accountability has been overtaken by the demons of quantification and control. The means by which the Treasury regulates public money has become the means by which the centre controls everything on which money is spent.

To every activity is attached a pecuniary value and thus a performance. To every performance is attached a target and to every target a league table. The targets may seem to be guided by what people say they want in focus groups, but in reality they are “negotiated” by power blocs within the public service. Their enforcement depends on matrices of budgets, feedbacks and incentives, covered by quasi-contracts and internal pricing systems. Orwell’s future, depicted as “a boot stamping on a human face for ever”, is now a computer mouse implanted in the brain.

I remember once watching mesmerised as one of Blair’s “delivery czars”, Michael Barber, power-pointed his way through his latest public service targets in front of his beaming boss. Across the nation money was pouring in at the top of some Heath Robinson graph while out of the bottom were happy children learning, old people warming, hips replacing, roads mending, Africans no longer starving and prisoners trooping to jail. It was beautiful, clean and, above all, numerical. I was surprised that Barber was not wearing a white coat.

The quantification regime begun under Thatcher and John Major and perfected under Blair carried to its logical conclusion the ideal of government of the Webbs and early socialists. They took public services from churches, guilds, charities and public institutions and vested them in elected councils and ministries. The last quarter of the 20th century removed them yet further, to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office.

Lord Turnbull’s jibe last week that Brown was a “Stalinist” was hardly fair. It was under Turnbull as cabinet secretary that delivery teams mimicked Stalin’s pseudo-contractual Gosplan, with ministries reduced to gosarbitrazh boards negotiating the internal state market place. The new element is that in Britain the state retains control but subcontracts delivery, usually at much greater expense, to friends in the private sector.

Not a week passes without this system showing obvious signs of collapse. A computer sends thousands of passports to the wrong people, including terrorists. A call to an out-of-hours doctor in north Wales is answered uselessly by a call centre in Cardiff. As schools “teach the league table”, the number of 16-18s not in school or training rises under Labour by 20%. As GCSE results attract a bigger bonus than cutting truancy, school attendance falls.

Quantification makes computers honey-traps for ministers. John Reid and Patricia Hewitt are putty in the hands of their salesmen. Yet a 2005 survey showed that, of seven comparable governments, Britain had the highest computer “scrap rate”, the weakest contracts and the most uncompetitive market, quite apart from the poor value added of many of the machines. Yet these computers now have a validity of their own, blighting the NHS budget, farm payments, child support, ID cards, criminal records, tax credits and, most recently, doctor recruitment. They do not measure value but are a surrogate for it, so that what the computer cannot measure is valueless.

Yet government by numbers is easier to attack than to replace. The target culture may be the enemy of heart but Blair and Brown became obsessed with control because they felt a government machine they did not understand was blindly resisting them. Blair’s famous “scars on my back” was a reprise of Thatcher’s “I must have more power to smash socialism”.

But where is the politician to cry, “Give me less control, fewer numbers, no targets”? Cameron may deplore the NHS losing its heart to a computer, but with what will he replace the computer - himself?

This other side of the great divide is hard to define. Occasionally Brown intimates (as Blair does not) what might be missing. He murmurs decentralisation, localism, even that lost Blairite waif, community. Brown cannot be stupid: he must see that his way of running the government is not just crippling public institutions with debt but is also stripping them of all leadership and morale. Nor is it delivering public satisfaction. His control over the output of units of welfare has become the same bureaucratic mess as afflicted his Kremlin doppelganger.

Locating a different way of governing public services - finding Cameron’s “heart of the NHS” - will be the great challenge of British politics over the next decade. The search is reflected in Curtis’s television series with its assertion of human freedom expressed not through atomised markets but through collective institutions and the ballot box. It is reflected in a new Civitas pamphlet by Danny Kruger, Cameron’s aide, pleading (yet again) for the little platoons. Society, says Kruger, has lost the intermediate tier of bonding institutions: not just schools, hospitals and police stations, but also pubs, shops and post offices. As a result, between the individual and the distant state there is only “social desertification”.

Such analysis is always strong on criticism but weak on prescription. Like the Blairites who championed communitarianism before 1997, Cameron’s people want to put the heart back into families and voluntary institutions. Whenever there is a stabbing or a riot they wonder what happened to the local leaders who are so vocal in communities abroad. Where is Britain’s civic glue? The best that most British neighbourhoods can summon up is a vicar.

The truth is that all these crusaders for a new order for public services are frightened of the only means of wresting the small and the local from central control. It is through reviving local democracy. It means more elections to regain control of schools, streets, libraries, clinics and police. The French have one elected person for every 116 voters, the Germans 250 and the British 2,600. They have civic leadership as a result. People are governed by those they know and have elected.

Last week saw a timid step towards restoring power to localities in a report to Brown from Sir Michael Lyons. He suggested a more flexible council tax, a mild liberalising of local government and little else. What happened? Labour and Conservative spokesmen alike took hold of Lyons and smashed his face against the wall. They jeered him and said they would never, ever give local people such power. Civic leadership and community control, they implied, were for wimps. Real government sticks to computers.

We still have a long way to go to find Cameron’s heart - not to mention Brown’s.

simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk

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