If David Cameron becomes Prime Minister next year the men in white coats will be back in Downing Street. The Tory leader made it clear in his speech at Manchester this week that he wants to be surrounded by boffins rather than bankers. Sir James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner tycoon, has been asked to reignite the white heat of technology that Mr Cameron hopes will blast Britain out of the recession.

The newly appointed Tory technology supremo, who prefers to be called James and says he “doesn’t mind about a peerage”, is determined to make sure that Britain never has to rely on the City again.

Instead of “people just making money out of money”, he wants the Conservatives to inspire a new generation of inventors. Britain, he warns, is lagging far behind its competitors in the field of invention and technology. “America files 19 times more patents than us, South Korea seven times more, China nine times more — we have stopped inventing things. Pharmaceutical companies are almost the only ones left.”

Sir James, who is worth more than £700 million, is one of the few people in the top 20 of The Sunday Times Rich List who has made a fortune from his own inventions. The bagless vacuum cleaner, the Ballbarrow and the Airblade hand dryer are his most successful products — and he will unveil his latest product next week.

He first met David Cameron 18 months ago — “he came round the factory” — and George Osborne has just asked him to head a task force on technology that is likely to include Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce, and Sir Christopher Gent, the former chief executive of Vodafone.

Sir James says that his aim is to make engineers as revered as architects and artists. “The British love the idea of mad inventors — think of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Tomorrow’s World — but they don’t think of doing it themselves. Isambard Brunel was voted the second-favourite Briton. The success of Top Gear is interesting.”

He believes that Mr Cameron could transform manufacturing by following the Dyson blueprint across immigration, the tax system, culture and education. “There are some easy things to do. At the moment we train a huge number of foreign students in science and engineering but they all have to go home after their doctorate. That is mad. America hangs on to those people. We should let them stay indefinitely.”

Sir James also wants to nurture more home-grown talent. The problem starts with the curriculum in schools. “I am not a great fan of joint science GCSEs. I gather they look at the sociology of science, that’s a pity.” He wants to bring back design and technology classes. “Margaret Thatcher was a scientist, she invented raspberry ripple and made design and technology compulsory in schools. Jacqui Smith [the former schools minister] made it not compulsory.

“Somehow we have driven everything that’s creative and risky out of our school system so it becomes about people learning things from facts rather than experimenting.”

The Government’s obsession with health and safety has been a disaster for science education, he believes. “You need a little bit of danger — tool kits and Bunsen burners. Our generation survived. A saw, a chisel and a file used properly are not dangerous. Schools need more workshops.”

He wants to attract experienced scientists back into the classroom. “A lot of people who work in industry could spend the last few years of their career in schools inspiring children. You could give them tax breaks by allowing them to pay lower tax on their pension.” He is considering giving science graduates who go into manufacturing or teaching a partial rebate on their university tuition fees. “That’s an interesting idea worth looking at. Almost half of trained engineers end up in the City.”

Too often, he says, children are steered towards the arts. “Technology and design should be as prestigious as classics, it is a demanding subject. We dismiss it as being all about the toolshed, just using your hands. Models and pop stars are considered more successful.

“But only 16 per cent of engineers are unhappy in their careers, compared with 44 per cent of journalists and 25 per cent of medics. We need to show it’s respectable to make money out of making things, not just shuffling money around.”

It is, he admits, going to be a battle to redress the balance. “We’ve lost confidence. We think the Japanese are cleverer and the Germans are better at technology but we are traditionally very good at making things. We still produce the best jet engines in the world and we have fantastic pharmaceuticals. During the war we invented radar, jet engines, the computer and the atomic bomb all in five years — that’s less than a third of the time of this Labour Government.”

Sir James wants to encourage venture capitalists to back new inventions. “You should get a tax break if you are investing in technology. Only 3 per cent of venture capitalists’ money goes into manufacturing start-ups — it’s 25 per cent in America. Lastminute.com got £400 million, Rolls-Royce couldn’t raise £250 million. That sums up the City. But if they had analysed it, they would have realised that Rolls-Royce is a much bigger company doing really valuable things, whereas Lastminute.com just sells tickets.”

The man who was given a knighthood by Tony Blair clearly feels disillusioned with Labour. He was baffled that his attempt to set up an engineering academy in Bath was stymied last year by Ed Balls. “They talked about science a lot but I don’t think they did many concrete actions. They dithered over nuclear power and coal-powered fire stations, they dithered over big transport schemes . , . we need to be much more positive and go out and do things.”

For Sir James, becoming an inventor was an act of rebellion. “My brother had gone off to read classics at Cambridge, my father and my grandfather had done classics at Cambridge, so I decided to go to art school. There I discovered there was a thing called design.” He lost millions inventing his famous bagless vacuum cleaner. “I kept going because I love inventing, I’ve never been unhappy doing it. But we got deeper and deeper into debt — it got into the millions. Eventually the vacuum cleaner became successful. I was 49 before that happened.”

His secret is to mess up. “When we start a project, we deliberately do the wrong thing. If you do the right thing, the logical thing, all you are doing is following the same path as everybody else. The hand dryer is quite a good example — you would have thought you need heat to dry hands, but we scrape the water off instead.

“I love making mistakes. People think they are a bad thing and you get marked down but I take the view that people who make the mistakes should get the most marks because they’re the people who ventured out and discovered things.”

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