The Prime Minister today launches yet another official Guardian Angel. This one is rather more Mary Poppins than Norland Nanny. The Risk and Regulation Advisory Council (RRAC to those who rate bodies by the impenetrability of their abbrevs) is intended to protect us from the cotton-wool approach to risk. It should control the wilder excesses of health and safety legislation, such as the legend that children must wear goggles to play conkers, the threat of hanging baskets, and the proposal that ballet dancers wear hard hats. This council's first targets are superbug scares and the terror of Reubenesque plumpness. Its mission statement is to promote proportionate responses to public risk, “particularly when faced with event-led pressure”. It should be nicknamed OfRracy.

Events, dear regulators, events. The United Kingdom is becoming the most risk-averse society since the Garden of Eden before the serpent slid up. Health and safety prefects may trundle up to the workplace in executive charabancs to ensure that everybody's bootlaces are tied according to the regulations. Hot on their heels, the Riskers and Regulators (without helmets) will skateboard up to tell workers not to be so wet and untie those shoelaces. But who will regulate the regulators? Behind them there will have to be OfCotton-wool to reimpose Nanny, for fear of worse. And so ad infinitum. The regulators and nannies will stretch to crack of doom, and may try to secure us even from that. Life is indeed a gamble at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it. But it isn't. And we have to face it, without official nannies or captains.