Michael Heseltine calls for more cappuccino and less cocoa on top

As, like an ancient mariner, George Osborne surveys the great Sargasso sea of the British economy – industry becalmed, caught up in the tangled weed of banks and regulations, sailors dropping on the decks like dead albatrosses – we heard from Michael Heseltine how he would have done it differently.

Hezza will be 80 next year and he is beginning to show his age. But he still has that mighty mane of hair, white now rather than blond, and more follicles on his eyebrows than some of us have on our scalps. He looks as if he could still pick up the ceremonial mace as he once famously did, though perhaps not swing it around his head again without risking a hernia.

Osborne fiddles at the margins, a tax on pasties here, a 1% cut in something there. But Heseltine was the man who said he would "intervene before breakfast, before lunch and before dinner".

He was talking to the business committee about his report on the state of British industry: No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth. The chairman asked if he felt the report had been sidelined by the government. Hezza didn't think so. Ministers knew his views and would hardly have commissioned him if they'd wanted a different result.

Perhaps a degree of unusual naivete there. Like New Labour, New Tories are obsessed by appearance, which is always so much easier than action. The cocoa sprinkles are more important than the cappuccino. And action is what we need, according to Hezza.

Government is centralised and amateur; Whitehall is dysfunctional; ministers are more concerned about advancing their careers than tackling problems, in his opinion. Take the spending cuts: "Government appears like villains, descending like Mongol hordes on the most vulnerable, leaving community welfare like bleeding stumps."

It was all deeply depressing for Hezza. The prime minister had visited China and Brazil, both allegedly part of our strategy for emerging nations, and found not one British chamber of commerce in either country. Whitehall was forever grabbing power from the cities and the regions "so we analyse the problem and we decide that what is needed is more centralism".

Over in the chamber, Mr Osborne was explaining how central government would get the economy sailing merrily on its way. For 31 months now, his tactic has been to say: "Things may be getting worse, but they would be getting worse even faster if we did what Labour wanted. And, in any case, it's all Labour's fault." As a long-term strategy, it is not convincing.

Mr Osborne has clearly felt he needs his own Ed Balls, someone to shout and yell and point an accusing finger at the other side. So he now has Sajid Javid, a short, bald firecat, and a former banker who, at the age of 20, when most young people are getting wasted, was high on opposing British membership of the European exchange rate.

"I will take no lectures!" he yelled at the Labour benches, at least sounding like a real student. "They have created an economic inferno, and now they are throwing stones at the firefighters!"

Balls may have met his match.