On this page today I am about to take a risk. Ten minutes ago I asked a Whitehall press officer a question. Upon her answer my whole argument depends. But because I can guess it I am launching into my column regardless.

Zoe at the Treasury sounded helpful when promising to call me back, and doubtless she will. But that may not be until evening. So I will spend the day writing this column, trusting Zoe’s answer does not spoil my argument.

Reckless? I am strangely confident, certain that I have spotted yet another of Gordon Brown’s fatuous and unproductive little ideas, and that it will have come to nothing. Or so I concluded when a year ago, on March 8, 2006, The Guardian carried, online, this report: “Gordon Brown today floated the idea of ‘midnight football’ for badly behaved youngsters, as he put forward a series of carrot-and-stick schemes for dealing with unruly teenagers. Under the plans, law-abiding kids would get up to £25 a month of vouchers to be spent on sports and leisure facilities, while those out of control would be given ‘mentors’ to keep them out of trouble . . . ‘This is not a handout; if you don’t behave, you don’t get it,’ he told GMTV . . .”

The Chancellor of the Exchequer thought his idea a runner. I thought it so pie-in-the-sky that it was astonishing anyone had put ballpoint to beermat to record it. When I read the report, the plan shrieked “won’t happen” at me, so I resolved to check what came of it.

Today I did. While we await the Treasury’s reply, let’s step back for a more general look at the emerging shape of this Chancellor’s political imagination.

Last week Mr Brown announced that immigrants should do community work before being allowed to become citizens. He was also said to be thinking of “trial” or “temporary” citizenships. It did not take researchers at Conservative Central Office long to list a few of the obvious questions, to which I’ve added some more of my own.

- How many people will these proposals affect?

- How many extra civil servants will be needed to administer the scheme?

- What will it cost to administer?

- For how long will would-be citizens do “community work”?

- What community work? Where? Who’s doing it at present? Who will accommodate them?

- Who will pay them?

- Will this apply to all those seeking British citizenship — to applicants already working and/or living here (probably the majority)? To doctors and nurses?

- How will this help to track the uncounted illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers who have no intention of applying for citizenship?

- How will this deter illegal immigrants from entering the UK in the first place?

- What is the point in granting “provisional” citizenship when we can’t find illegal immigrants or failed asylum-seekers in the first place?

- How long would provisional citizenship last?

- What will it be provisional on?

- What would happen to individuals who have provisional citizenship revoked? Would they be deported?

- Who will decide? Will such decisions be appealable?

- What is the evidence that (apart from imported partners in arranged marriages) failure to integrate is a major problem among legitimate citizenship-seekers?

And so on. May I detain you a moment with a few more of Mr Brown’s bright ideas: Those Brown Initiatives In Full.

“I would like to talk about Britishness and the future of Britain. I think people who come to Britain must learn the English language.” (September 2006). In October 2006 the Government cut funding for English classes, “effectively ending” as, one Labour backbencher complained, “free tuition for low-paid migrant workers”.

In his 2006 Budget he promised to create “one million youth volunteers”. So far there are 42,000. The Youth Volunteering Commission he created (run by Rod Aldridge, who had donated £1 million to the Labour Party eight weeks before his appointment), is costing £1.4 million a year on “management and administration”.

“Interested people will establish a new Institute and Forum for Britishness Studies examining the forces at work in shaping the future of Britain,” said Mr Brown in the Express in 2004. Nothing happened.

“What is the British equivalent of July 4, or even the French July 14, for that matter? . . . What is our equivalent of the national symbolism of a flag in every garden?” he asked the Fabian Society on January 14, 2006. Search me. No proposals followed. Then he announced a new annual Veterans’ Day on June 27 of every year. Did you notice it? Few did. Almost nothing happened.

What happened to the new, independent NHS Board? To the Economic Plan for the Middle East? To the Written Constitution? To bringing the World Cup to Britain? . . . Oh, lay off. This would be cruel sport were this man not proposing to be Prime Minister in a few months. His ideas have an April Fool quality. Presbyterian? They are inconsequential to the point of frivolity.

Mr Brown’s friends encourage us to contemplate his first 100 days. They call this period the “Brown Bounce”: 100 days apparently packed with policy surprises, all wildly popular. But what are they? Ah, that’s for them to know and us to guess. Perhaps sunbeams are to be extracted from cucumbers, or the secret of perpetual motion to be discovered by British Forum for the Discovery of the Secret of Perpetual Motion, to be funded by Mr Brown?

Where is this treasure chest of glittering initiatives that nobody (including Mr Brown himself as Chancellor these past ten years) had somehow thought of before? Has he thought of them yet, but is keeping them secret? Or does he plan to think of them later? There is a difference between postulating, as an abstract idea, a hundred days of whiz-bang new initiatives that have crowds cheering and polls soaring, and actually thinking of some.

If they are such eureka ideas, how come they never occurred to anyone, including Mr Brown, earlier? Because, you see, we do have some experience of the ideas that Mr Brown thought of earlier. The precedents are not encouraging. Though at first sight random, tinkering, fidgety, hit-and-miss affairs, a thread does run through Brownite initiatives. I would call it “how not to create a great sculpture”. If this Chancellor were a sculptor, his approach would be to take a big lump of stone, observe that it was by no means the boy David, chip a bit off where the boy David obviously wasn’t, stick a bit on where the boy David obviously ought to be. And continue in this way, chipping and sticking, cutting and pasting, lunging with his chisel, then dabbing with his glue brush. But it’s not enough.

. . . Here this column must be interrupted. I have just taken a telephone call. To my question about Mr Brown’s plan to pay youths to stay out of trouble, the Treasury can now give an answer. The answer is that this is nothing to do with the Treasury, so why don’t I ask the Department for Education and Skills?

I do. They call me back. Yes indeed, some “pilots” to try out Mr Brown’s idea did take place as promised. Management consultants were called in to “research” whether the IT existed elsewhere in the world for the voucher cards that youths were to be issued with. The consultants charged £2 million (isn’t Google getting expensive?) to discover that no such technology exists. A from-scratch scheme would cost £30 million. But the budget for the entire project was just £44 million. This would leave only £14 million to spend on the benefits.

The whole thing has been abandoned. “I will do such things,” says King Lear, “— what they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

I know not what they are, either. Nor, I suspect, does King Gordon.

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