But what will they chop up all the vegetables with? In the week that the Home Secretary admitted the Government is considering installing metal detectors in schools to catch kids carrying knives, the announcement of compulsory cooking classes has a certain La-La land quality about it.

On one side stands a Britain where the Home Secretary boasts of bravely entering a South London kebab shop (with police minders) in the middle of the afternoon; on the other, a Britain whose Schools Secretary - apparently oblivious to the knife-wielding teenagers - sells a vision of hearty (but slim) 13-year-olds running eagerly home from school, via nowhere more threatening than the greengrocer, to prepare fresh tomato sauce and vegetarian curries for their grateful parents for tea.

At my own school cooking classes we learnt to make Christmas cake. It took up most of a term and persuaded me, for ever, that it isn't worth the hassle. I suppose teaching how to boil a carrot might get a little dull for the teacher, yet it would have been of rather more use. But when Ofsted investigated lessons in “food technology” in secondary schools two years ago, it found them focused on cooking trivia: how to arrange toppings decoratively on pizza, or the use of computers to design complicated icing patterns on non-existent cakes. At least I had to bake the cake first.

So we ought to cheer the government announcement that all teenagers will have a total of eight hours' compulsory cookery lessons at school by 2011, even as we wonder whether they will be allowed to use real knives. Will it be like those in-flight meals where you try to cut a hard frozen pat of butter at 25,000 feet with a plastic airline knife? Can you even chop a tomato with one of those? Perhaps the ingredients will come washed and ready-chopped, although that would surely defeat the object.

The chair of the School Food Trust, Prue Leith, took to the airwaves yesterday to applaud the cooking lessons, foreseeing roast chicken and vegetarian curries spilling forth from thousands of school kitchens. But they haven't even yet rebuilt the kitchens promised by Tony Blair in response to Jamie Oliver's school dinners campaign three years ago. It was only in December that Ms Leith was attacking the Government's city academies programme for building brand-new, £25 million schools whose kitchens boasted deep-fat fryers but nowhere to chop fresh vegetables, and nowhere for kids to sit down and eat. The Building Schools for the Future programme, which is supposed to be rebuilding or remodelling all of Britain's 3,500 secondary schools, has so far completed one whole school - in three years.

The 15 per cent of secondary schools that the Schools Secretary admitted yesterday have no kitchen at all is only the start of it; the rest might have a “kitchen” but it isn't for doing what you and I would call cooking. It's for frying and reheating. As for the 800 cookery teachers who are going to be trained - these turn out to be the poor old teaching assistants upon whose shoulders everything from extended school opening to literacy hours to knocking up a quick vegetarian curry seems to fall.

Initiatives such as these cooking lessons inhabit what I call the La-La land of politics: imaginary places where ideal citizens welcome ministerial plans with grateful smiles and promises to do their very, very best. Most anti-obesity drives occupy the same fantasy area (watch the Health Secretary Alan Johnson promise us today that we will all get extremely healthy and take lots of exercise soon via his “cross-government obesity strategy”). It is politicians without decent ideas for how to improve the basics - like reading, say, or GCSE results, or clean sheets in hospital - who take refuge in the La-La land of empty initiatives: a “deep clean”, perhaps, or a “National Year of Reading”.

My daughter was watching an excruciating programme called In the Night Garden the other day, an updated Teletubbies for the under-5s. There is an Igglepiggle character, who is blue and carries a red blanket, an Upsy Daisy who seems to have a problem with her bed, which won't keep still, and a character called Makka Pakka who looks like a bit like a Teletubby and has a trolley/scooter called an Og Pog (it carries his Uff-uff dryer, but you didn't need to know that). Then there are the musical Tombliboos; a big family of little people called the Pontipines, and some blow-up pillows floating around the place, called - you want to know? - Haahoos. Not to mention the merry-go-round, and the Ninky Nonk and the Pinky Ponk.

Well, while she was gripped by that, I had been listening to the Northern Rock statement - and it suddenly struck me that Alistair Darling really didn't make a lot more sense than the Pinky Ponk. Something has happened to make this Government utterly surreal, its claim to be in control of anything pure fantasy. Look at us in the media: we can barely even be bothered to finish off a Cabinet minister such as Peter Hain any more. Because it wouldn't make any difference to anything. The Work and Pensions Secretary resigns? Uh-oh. Chancellor nationalises a bank? Oopsy-daisy.

And so it was that I turned on the television yesterday to see the Prime Minister's special farewell to Konnie Huq, the children's television presenter. Yes, the Prime Minister. In between his world tour and not appearing in the House of Commons while his Chancellor announced the effective nationalisation of a bank, Gordon Brown made a little film to commemorate the retirement of a Blue Peter presenter.

The Prime Minister appeared after Basil Brush, who is a stuffed fox, and a couple of comedians. “Thanks for everything you've done,” Mr Brown said to Ms Huq, with that strange television smile of his. “You've done brilliantly. Thank you.”

Tombliboo, you see. La-La land. Night-night.

Alice Miles was named Columnist of the Year at the What the Papers Say awards last month

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