Imagine a minister, a junior minister, unshowy, unknown, perhaps a little dull. Let us call our minister Audrey Williamson, her department the Department of Health, and her portfolio the division that deals (say) with GPs’ surgeries. Rehearsing her party leader’s longstanding promise to make access more convenient for patients with daytime jobs, her ill-attended speech at her party’s annual conference is rewarded by the perfunctory applause of bored delegates who have heard it every year. The press do not even bother to report it.

But in the months that follow, something extraordinary happens. Audrey Williamson actually does sort it out. Clearing her diary of dinners, photo-calls and ribbon-cutting, taking a firm line with the Whitehall mandarins who insist it’s all much more difficult than it sounds, she gets agreement and makes it stick. Notices appear in local newspapers advising residents that surgeries now open on Saturdays from 10.00 until 16.00, and on Monday and Wednesday evenings from 18.00 until 20.30.

Mrs Williamson is made a minister of state – this time in the department dealing with local government. In a little-noticed speech she undertakes to draft guidelines for recycling and rubbish collection that people can actually understand. She launches a cash-back scheme for the disposal of glass and plastic bottles, all of which will carry a 5p deposit, and a barcode readable by receiver machines installed in supermarkets.

A small thing, but it works. Penny-pinchers are to be seen scouring ditches and waste ground for plastic and glass. Her next job is bigger: to untangle the mess into which tax-credit payments have fallen. It takes her two years to simplify the system and clear the backlog, but in the end she succeeds.

Audrey Williamson is now becoming a national figure, her name synonymous with the quiet sorting out of administrative tangles and the pushing through of improved ways of achieving existing objectives.

Then something else extraordinary happens. Asked on Newsnight to describe her vision for change, she replies: “I don’t have a vision for change.”

Jeremy Paxman is completely stumped. “I just want to make things work,” she explains.

“Ah – you mean the Reform Agenda?” “ ‘Reform’ is a bit strong,” she replies. “There are some useful improvements to be made. It doesn’t require any fundamental change or reorganisation; we just need to sharpen up our act. Results are what count.”

For over all this time, Audrey Williamson has never once made a speech about vision, change or visions for change. She has never claimed she has a dream, or a “passion” for education, the NHS or anything else. There is little in her oratory about rebirth or renewal, new beginnings or a town called Hope. Principles, values, core values, moral compasses, prophecy and all the visionary and inspirational qualities that politicians peddle these days are absent from her vocabulary. So is the language of revolution and transformation. She has not promised a “new” Britain. Vows, pledges, promises, covenants and constitutions are crayons too bright for her palette. Mrs Williamson just wants to make things work.

I believe that this woman and her philosophy could take the British electorate by storm. We would fast realise how sick we have become of the overblown and confessional rhetoric of the 21st-century political communications industry. The mob would carry Mrs Williamson shoulder-high into Downing Street.

Change, Renewal and Principle are the chocolate, brandy butter and Christmas pudding of politics. Vision is the tinsel. We are surfeited. The truth, if we would but face it, is that our world and the lives we lead are not changing as fast today as when our fathers and grandfathers were young; nor is there any great clash of rival ideologies between which to decide. We stand at no threshhold, no fork in the road, and on no brink. We contemplate no broad, sunlit uplands. Our lives are, for most and for much of the time, not as bad as they are.

Few of our politicians are seriously corrupt. No big ideas are offered or sought for any fundamental rebalancing of wealth, work or welfare. Public services, though dogged by incompetence, overcomplication and pockets of poor morale, are provided through structures and on principles challenged by few. Future changes are likely to be incremental; as to what these should be, the differences between political parties are modest.

Most voters know this. They are not aware of any great new schemes for government that nobody else has thought of, and they do not really believe their MPs are either. They hear politicians talking in that ghastly hybrid patois described by a recent Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet (The 2008 Lexicon: a guide to political Newspeak) as “a lethal blend of management-speak (‘strategic framework’, ‘benchmark’, ‘best practice’), therapy-speak (‘holistic’, ‘empowerment’, ‘closure’) and postmodernism (‘narrative’, ‘cultural shift’, ‘truth’)” and they switch off. But they yearn for simple competence.

As the would-be presidential candidates in the United States fall over each other to promise “change”, our own political class would be wise to stand back and ask whether the American style – we might term it “transfigurative-rhapsodic” – really does work here too. Is the British electorate as smitten on all this Joan of Arc stuff as the communications industry keeps telling the politicians who hire it? At the end of the 1980s, Labour did need to indicate a fundamental change in who they were and what they stood for, and Tony Blair correctly sensed it. By the end of the last century the Tories did too, and David Cameron has been right to signal this insistently. But changes to both parties must be distinguished from fundamental changes to the country itself, for which it is unclear there is much call. From Gordon Brown the language of political convulsion (“My Vision for Change”) has never rung true; from Mr Cameron it begins to irritate; and now Nick Clegg has started it too.

The estate of politics pays large sums of money to the estate of marketing. Professionals tend to prescribe remedies that lie within their own competence. Marketing is about perceptions, not substance, and is essentially short-term, aiming to turn perceptions round within at most a couple of years, and uninterested in the problems that perception unmatched by substance may finally bring. It is therefore not surprising that, advising politicians, the communications industry has majored on inspiration, passion and novelty, for they are the cocaine of image-making. They deliver a sharp, optimistic and immediate kick.

Afterwards comes the cynicism, the disappointment and the disregard. In 2008 Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg all feel a need to “send out a message”. But if they really understand political communications, rather than the fashionable industry patter, they will begin to sense this year that a Mrs Williamson would be sending out the most popular signal of all. She has no vision for change. She just wants to make things work.

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