ONE OF MY longstanding pleasures is dreaming up policy slogans for a made-up think-tank. “Save energy: slaughter the first-born”, “Trees have rights, too”. That sort of thing.

Uncannily, one real (at least in some senses) think-tank, Demos, always seems to beat me to it. Achingly trendy (in the same way that wearing tank tops is now back in fashion), it never fails to live down to one’s expectations. I used to think that its self-description as a “greenhouse for new ideas”, or the statement by one of its staff that she was “renowned for surfing the Zeitgeist” could not be beaten for self-absorbed, pseudo-literate, empty-minded drivel. I was wrong.

My imaginary think-tank’s slogan was “beyond thinking”. Demos has not — yet — adopted such a slogan. But its latest pamphlet, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate is so absurdly removed from any normal perception of the real world that Demos clearly doesn’t need the slogan. That it exists in a universe beyond thinking is obvious.

The author of the paper, John Holden, argues that politicians need to show their support for British culture by “publicly embracing” artistic pursuits. Our politicians are shamed by their EU equivalents. Tony Blair, for instance, should take a leaf out of Dominique de Villepin’s book and start publishing poetry.

Ignore the worth of M de Villepin’s opus (although his poems do seem to emanate from the same well of inspiration as Eric Cantona’s “when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”).

Does it make M de Villepin any less of a twit that he has literary pretensions? Would Mr Blair, or any other politician in the Britain inhabited by those of us who are not employed by Demos, be regarded as anything other than a laughing stock if he started spouting his own poetry at the dispatch box? Being charitable, one might say that David Blunkett’s reputation was hardly enhanced when he published his own poetry.

Our cultural life has too much political involvement, not too little. When the Arts Council funds a disabled lesbian finger-painting dance group, it does so because that’s what politicians want it to do.

We need less of that, not more. The last thing we need is politicians who think they know about culture.