There is a famous old story that Nye Bevan told about political disillusionment. As a young man, he wanted to wield power on behalf of the people. So he thought he would become a town councillor. But when he did, he was told that all the real power had gone to the county council. So he got elected to that. Too late again: all the power had gone to parliament. Right then, he became an MP. But once he'd got there, it seemed that only ministers had power . . . and so on.

Looking at this government afresh, since it was re-elected a fortnight ago, it seems that something similar has happened to it. All these bright young people were, once upon a time, obsessed with becoming what they have now become, the unchallenged political leaders of the country. The Kinnockites have grown older and greyer since they followed the red-haired Welsh orator; the Islington lawyers have grown purse-mouthed and lost their hair; the one-time northern Marxists have shaved their faces and shined their shoes. They have got there. They have made it. The Tories are still mumbling in the emergency ward of public life, and Whitehall lies at new Labour's feet.

But, like some fairy tale gone wrong, now they are actually cabinet ministers, they realise that politicians are no longer quite as important as they imagined. No, things have moved on. The people they really admire, and whom the rest of the world really admires, are entrepreneurs, business people, tycoons, the self-made rich. After all that effort and slog, all those years of meetings, being a political leader seems, well, a bit dowdy by comparison.

It has often been said of Tony Blair that he is star-struck by successful businessmen, and he certainly seems to surround himself with as many as he can. They are brought in to lend respectability, and even authority, to government initiatives. The Prime Minister might be thought to have climbed about as far up life's tree as you can get, but he has not made his own fortune or business. These guys have.

Business is the real ruler of the modern world, and this Labour government, with its business-fixated Queen's Speech, more or less admits it. What do Gordon Brown and Estelle Morris now want our children to learn to be as they grow up? Not public servants, or engineers, but the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Brown is a different case from Blair. The Chancellor seems immune to the temptations of the dolce vita, and to have absolutely no interest in material wealth for himself, or indeed in the trappings of power. He barely seems to notice his surroundings, still less pine for more opulence, finer wines or swankier suits. But his great "enterprise for all" initiative, which brutally stole a march on Wednesday's Queen's Speech, seems a classic Washington think-tank/Harvard Business School recipe for Britain, the latest example of Brown's love affair with America and US entrepreneurial culture.

I am not saying the government is necessarily wrong. The way the world now works is that countries with strong competition regimes, low business taxes and entrepreneurial energy become the success stories. And Brown is not a trickle-down Tory; he has expended huge energy on getting people into work and directing a bit more cash to struggling families through tax credits. But there was a still, small voice amid the hubbub of protest at this month's Unison conference, which, I thought, got it right. Where, asked one innocent foot-soldier of the Labour movement, are all those brilliant business people who are going to sweep in and run our public services, our hospitals and transport systems, so much better? Were they the same brilliant entrepreneurs who have made such a success of the privatised rail system? Or the ones whose companies have taken over so many foreign manufacturing competitors rather than . . . er . . . the reverse?

That is the problem with the Queen's Speech. Cosying up to big business brings a hundred minor embarrassments, but it becomes very worrying when politicians start to believe that entrepreneurialism is like magic dust that can be scattered about, willy-nilly, to turn struggling, underfunded public services into world-class successes. We must remember a few truths about people in business. They want to make money. Whatever their present voting habits, they are mostly life's natural Tories. Not all of them are very effective.

And the business people most likely to be seconded to non-money-making government work are the ones companies can most afford to lose. Sometimes, the best people to run things - schools, hospitals, even rail services - are the people who have spent a lifetime doing just that, but who need more encouragement, more money, training and freedom to do better. The public services are still full of intelligent, hard-working and often idealistic people who aren't chasing a big home and a BMW as the most important things in life. The hurt of public sector unions is not always prejudice; it is often a cool recognition of how things really are.

One of the biggest questions for the second term is the extent to which the government recognises that, in the end, business should get on with its business, and the public sector continue to be an independent, self-confident zone of public life - reformed, outward-looking, but not constantly denigrated as second best to the real heroes, the entrepreneurs. The ministers at the sharp end know this in their hearts. There are many former teachers, lecturers, local government officers and health service employees in the new government, and now is their moment. They must, for the sake of the country as well as the Labour Party, stand up for the honour and reputation of public service against the naive post-Thatcher belief that business techniques are the answer to everything. Bevan knew better; and a second term that turns into a civil war on the centre left is not what people voted for.

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