I couldn’t quite work out why the little boy referred to by Gordon Brown in his conference address – the six-year-old who had learnt to read with the Every Child a Reader programme – was reading The Gingerbread Man, where the hero of the story gets gobbled up by a fox. It’s a refreshingly old-fashioned tale, without a happy ending, where the characters are greedy and not to be trusted and everyone gets their just deserts except the wily fox, who lies and gets what he wants. No, I’m not going where you think I am with that . . .

It turns out that The Gingerbread Man has been rebranded as a “sight recognition exercise” in the literacy hour. My version of the story, picked up in a Bournemouth shop, has been politically corrected as well, the little old man wearing a pinny and helping his wife to cook; I suppose to make it gender-equal.

A politically correct, anodyne exercise in word repetition: sounds like too many of the new Labour speeches we have heard in the past. Ridiculously, comments about Mr Brown’s speech on the Labour Party’s own website all referred yesterday to his s***ch, presumably because an electronic censor was blanking out the word “pee”. They were, quite literally, taking the piss out of his speech.

Mr Brown is blanking out anything that might make him less than wholly electable for a fourth Labour term. Everything about his speech, from titbits for the unions to the tit bit, when he made a grab for the female vote with a promise to treat breast cancer cases as urgent, was aimed at the polling booth. There was a particularly hilarious passage where the Prime Minister tried to make out that he was struggling with the day-to-day demands of getting his children up in the morning: “I am now understanding the daily pressures all families and all parents are under to do everything on time: make breakfast, get the kids to school with their homework done, make sure no one forgets their PE kit or a school play rehearsal.” This, from a man who was at work by 7am even when he wasn’t Prime Minister.

There is no radical educational agenda – just more, solid progress towards exams and certificates for everyone; “the biggest change in education in decades, a ten-year children’s plan” (eek) with a pledge for a specified five hours a week for sport, “and time for arts and music too” as an afterthought. Education may be his passion but there was no passionate embrace of city academies, diversity of provision, choice for parents – the territory the Tories plan to make their own.

But maybe this is what the country wants: a broadly new Labour agenda, new Labour-lite, without the radical edge, this time delivered with solid competence and mind-numbing attention to detail by a prime minister who, unlike the last, knows how to focus on an issue and see it through to the end. For those who waited with bated breath for the unveiling on Monday of the sparkling agenda for the decade ahead: er, there isn’t one. Or, more accurately, it’s pretty much the same as the last one all over again. If one thing is plain after Mr Brown’s speech, it is this: the next five years (let’s assume) are going to be very, very dull indeed. It’s almost a relief.

The interesting question is whether the Prime Minister is shying away from controversy because he has half an eye on the election, or because he is just shy of controversy. He even dismissed the revolutionary NHS review being led by his new Health Minister, Lord Darzi of Denham, that would require the downgrading of many much-loved local hospitals, with: “I can also say that, following the review by Professor Darzi, my aim for the next stage of an NHS personal to you: for every adult a regular check-up on the NHS.”

From revolution to a check-up (and what’s more, one announced by Patricia Hewitt a year and a half ago). Thus are great plans reduced to the practicalities of reelection; if I were Lord Darzi, I would be a little nervous about my review now.

And if that was cautious, the bones thrown to the dogs of the Daily Mail were pure cowardice: an attack on foreign workers, and a nasty elision of drug and gun crime with immigration.

Not that Mr Brown’s speech lacked ambition. The Prime Minister did promise education for every child in the world, the complete elimination of TB, polio, malaria, diphtheria and HIV/Aids, and “to combat cancer”.

Mmm. How?

There were two elements missing in a string of mostly nobly ideals. First, as Peter Mandelson asked on the Today programme yesterday, how to do it. It’s one thing to promise access to GPs and consultants when and where a patient wants, quite another to deliver that, as every health secretary since 1948 could tell him. In a big, unwieldy government, systems go wrong or do not exist. It is not like telling someone in the Treasury to do something, and it is done.

The second element is human behaviour. Mr Brown has an almost pure belief in the goodness of people; on Monday he referred to his father, how “his optimism led him to find goodness in everyone”.

The trouble is, people aren’t all good, and, unlike in fairytales where you know you can trust fairy godmothers but not foxes, they don’t behave as you expect them to. They are lazy and greedy and obstructive and perverse, and often just chaotic. Where real people meet unwieldy and impersonal systems, the systems collapse: look at the administrative chaos over tax credits and the huge levels of fraud. Where Mr Brown says “you have to show you are working hard” if you are to receive an educational maintenance allowance, or that “you have to meet with a health visitor” in return for higher maternity allowances, he is in some paradise of all-seeing government where a computer can peer inside a notebook or a bedroom and judge whether somebody really does deserve the extra grant. It just doesn’t happen like that.

But he won’t want to know all that, because the Brown brandwagon moves on, ineluctably fusing himself with Britain until he becomes a sort of inevitable event in our nation’s history. The serious man is the change. That’s it.

“Tested again and again, the resilience of the British people has been powerful proof of the character of our country,” he said of this summer’s series of near-misses. By which he means, of course, the resilience of Gordon Brown. When ministers parrot the line that the Prime Minister will take a decision on election timing not in his interest but “in the interests of the country”, they are probably speaking more truth than they realise; in his mind, it is one and the same thing. GB = GB.

Who, unlike that other GB, the Ginger Bread Man, will not be risking any sticky ending.

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