When Patricia Hewitt was Health Secretary, she didn’t know what to do. So she commissioned a study, breathlessly described as the “biggest public consultation of its kind ever held in England”, to find out what people wanted her to do. It was to be a “major, large-scale deliberative event . . . beyond anything the Government has embarked upon before in the health field”. No fewer than 125,000 questionnaires were sent out asking people what they wanted from their NHS. Some 42,000 responded or attended regional events. A 1,000-strong “citizens’ summit” was then selected for a round-table discussion in Birmingham to discover “the people’s priorities” – and broadcast live on the web, they exclaimed! It was so unbearably exciting that not a single report was filed from it.

The project cost £1.25 million. It was conducted by Opinion Leader Research, an organisation run by Deborah Mattinson, who is an old friend of Labour. Today Ms Mattinson is the pollster for Gordon Brown, and we might call Ms Hewitt’s megafocus group a “citizens’ jury”.

So in the week that Mr Brown announced a series of citizens’ juries to give people a say in the big issues affecting their lives – the welfare of children, crime, followed by, oh no, “nine simultaneous Citizens’ Juries on the future of the National Health Service, one in each region, linked by video” (that one again) – let us examine what Ms Hewitt’s “citizens’ summit” was all about.

“Deliberative events aim to involve people in the big decisions that will affect their lives,” explained OLR at the time. “The whole point of a deliberative event is to allow people a voice, whilst giving them all the facts they need to reach a fully informed opinion.” So far, so exactly like citizens’ juries.

And what happened? The participants said they wanted urgent appointments available on the day when they needed them, routine appointments available at a later date of their choice, easy access to appropriate local services out of hours . . . just what people always say they want from the NHS. What they didn’t much like was the idea of competition, which was what the Government was actually proposing.

So one participant came up with another suggestion – after all, there had to be something concrete out of a £1.25 million exercise – and that was a “Health MOT”, one of a “set of options created by participants”, said the report. Nearly everyone agreed with that idea and it became the headline proposal when the Department of Health reported the findings.

And who, out of all those thousands of participants, suggested the “Health MOT”? An obscure interim report disclosed it to have been . . . Patricia Hewitt. Then, far from the “Health MOT” being the in-depth physical check that the “citizens” had liked the thought of, the Department of Health turned it in the end into a patient questionnaire. As far as I’m aware it’s still government policy; this was only a year and a half ago. Probably someone somewhere in Whitehall is beavering away at the multiple choice: “do you get headaches (a) often; (b) sometimes; (c) rarely; (d) never?” “Are they (a) at the back of the head; (b) at the front; (c) I don’t know doctor, it’s my knees, you see . . .”

It’s probably clear that I don’t believe the Government will allow a citizens’ jury to determine policy. The Government doesn’t even appear ready to allow citizens to decide what ought to be under consideration: ask a representative group what should be under discussion and they would probably suggest immigration.

Government can be very bad at defining what it is that actually ticks people off. It knows what people ought to be worrying about – the welfare of underachieving kids, Darfur, “opportunity” – but ignores what they actually care about: that an 11-year-old was shot dead by a teenager and a pensioner killed by a group of young boys, or that council tax is too high, or they got a speeding ticket while their burglary went uninvestigated; that a kid at school is disrupting the class and the head cannot chuck him out; that they had to fill in 50 pages of forms just to set up a playgroup; or that Eastern Europeans are taking their houses and jobs. It’s not the big picture Mr Brown needs to worry about, but these lots of little ones.

Team Brown sees politics as a clear political choice: left or right, Labour or Conservative. So do most of those in the political media class. But many voters see it differently – it’s about a feeling that things aren’t quite right, or that the people in power are failing to understand what it is that really bothers them. It’s not about knowing that a citizens’ jury has been set up to examine the issue, or a Speaker’s Conference is going to look at voter engagement. In fact, that knowledge probably makes things worse.

When Rhys Jones was murdered in Liverpool last month, Mr Brown should have gone up there. He didn’t, because he believes that highlighting crime simply plays into people’s fears of it, and crime is better talked down. Only yesterday did he appear to wake up to the fact that he needed at least to talk about it, with promises of new police powers, CCTV and extra patrols.

In one way it is a relief not to have a Prime Minister cashing in on other people’s sorrow, but that is not all that Tony Blair was doing when he leapt to embrace the latest victim. He was also telling the public: “I recognise that you care about this.”

In the past week, to the backdrop of reports of more and more teenagers arrested and questioned over Rhys Jones’s murder, Mr Brown fêted Nelson Mandela and unveiled a statue of him in Westminster, then wrote an article in The Times about how he was going to save Darfur. I’m not surprised he lost his poll lead.

It’s all very well to have a big heart, but sometimes a Prime Minister needs a small mind as well.

Times Recommends

• Snow brings out the inner Tory in all of us
• Hail, Britain’s Indiana Jones of the Amazon
• Hewitt and Hoon – two rabbits, one hat