At Sunday school we were taught to say our prayers. Miss Silk told us to compile a list of things we hoped God might do for the world.

But that most disconcerting of voices, childish logic, whispered to me that God was better placed than me to know what to do. Why should I specify? So I hit upon a verbal formula which I stuck to for years before bed. I would mumble: “Please God, make everybody be as they ought to be and do as they ought to do.” I felt this more or less covered it.

Half a century later, a legislative fashion grips our House of Commons, which puts me in mind of that boyhood appeal to the Supernatural. In the hope of increasing the sum total of human happiness we are drafting laws to will the outcome rather than specify the means. Listening to Her Majesty intone her wretched Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, you could imagine her concluding “And my Government will lay before you a measure binding Government by law to act appropriately at all times” — then promptly departing in her coach.

The speech over, I joined a BBC Radio 2 panel on the Jeremy Vine programme. Listeners were calling in with their own proposals for new laws, beginning “My Government will . . .” I’ve taken part in a few of these in my time, and they’d all gone the same way: after a Queen’s Speech setting out the usual list of doubtless practical but timid and boring plans for legislation, we would open the phone lines, whereupon the public would deluge us with fantastic dreams and schemes: wish lists it would be hard to oppose, yet which could stand no earthly chance of making it into law in workable form.

But this year it was the other way round. Our Radio 2 callers were full of dull, workable suggestions. Gary, of Stoke, thought dangerous drivers should be forced to retake driving tests; Tony, from Southport, thought we could manage with substantially fewer MPs; and Teddy, in Nottingham, wondered why, if we cap bankers’ bonuses, we shouldn’t cap lawyers’ fees too. None of these proposals cost money, and, right or wrong, all were workable.

It was the Gracious Address that flapped off like a demented parrot into the realms of jurisprudentially illiterate fantasy.

Two examples stand out in their madness: the proposed new law “binding” the Government to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on overseas aid; and the proposed Fiscal Responsibility Act, “binding” the Government to halve the national deficit within four years. Less stark (and more insidious) was the implicit nonsense of establishing legal “rights” to good schooling, prompt medical care etc.

How are these rights to be enforced if the school, or scanner, or ambulance, doesn’t exist? How will the “compulsory” 0.7 per cent of GDP, or halving of the deficit, be policed? Will backsliding ministers face prison sentences, or be hauled through the streets in open carts and pelted by the populace? Will the PM have to write a letter to the Governor of the Bank of England? Or (more likely) will Parliament be empowered to certify by affirmative resolution that an inconvenient obligation may be temporarily waived “due to extraordinary circumstances” — a vote that government MPs will anyway be whipped to support?

You may not be surprised to learn that the Fiscal Responsibility Act is a Nigerian idea. I’ve been calling specialists all day to ask how it might work in Britain rather than Nigeria, but can find nobody prepared to give the plan serious attention. Only a literalist pedant, they imply, would be asking how this hot air could actually be given shape.

But apparently Gordon Brown wants to establish what he calls dividing lines with the Opposition. Let him. Tories should summon the courage to place themselves firmly on the other side of such lines. It’s time for the Opposition to celebrate, not duck, dividing lines.

Why would a PM want to oblige himself by law to carry out his own declared intentions? I can think of two possible reasons. Either he has lost confidence in himself to stick to his resolution, and is — so to speak — asking the police to help; or he fears that everyone else has lost confidence in his ability to keep his word, but hopes they may believe in the statute book if not in him.

So which is it with Mr Brown? Many conclude it’s just the second: a desperate marketing strategy based on the tacit admission that nobody believes him any more. But is it as simple as that? With this Prime Minister I sense something much, much weirder.

I call it the Hornby Dublo view of politics: a half-crazed conception of human affairs that sees social and economic history proceeding as trains proceed along the little tracks we children used to lay down for them with our model railway sets. Plan the trajectory; lay down the track; set the points and signals; assemble carriages and guard’s van; hitch the locomotive; apply the power, and — toot-toot — off goes the train.

Brown even writes the timetable. In this strange world, like the old Soviet Union, the distinction between actual and projected railways becomes blurred — or, rather, secondary, because they are distinguished only by tense: one is what is; the other what will be. WILL be — I picture him stamping his foot.

That saying things are so does not make them so; that declaring things will be so does not cause them to become so; that ruling heavy lines on to flow charts of ministerial endeavour does not cause real actions to flow; that making an impenetrable margin between what you will and won’t contemplate doesn’t make the uncontemplated disappear; that you cannot wish away the infinitely fragile interplay of human responses; that no box of spanners can stop political economy being more like the ecology of a forest than the engineering of a steam engine; that all experience teaches a politician to trust in the end to instinct, and then wing it; and that Mr Brown keeps turning away from these truths and burying his head in his model railway ... all this bespeaks (I believe) some terrible internal insecurity; some kind of arrested political development. Not only is this his reason for thinking the fantasy track-laying worthwhile, but his reason, too, for being baffled when others don’t get it.

But I no longer count these infirmities to Gordon Brown’s moral discredit. He is genuinely unwitting. It is to those who have known his weakness for many years, and never moved against him, that the final discredit is due. They may in the end destroy not only him, not only themselves, but their party too.

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