Why was Derek Wanless the Treasury's ideal candidate to write a report on the chronic underfunding of the health service, which paves the way for Labour's first serious raid on the piggy banks of Middle England?

Before I divulge his crucial qualification, it is worth noting how much time, money and effort this government spends on preparations for saying boo to a goose. While I do not doubt the skill of Wanless's dissection of the NHS, the review's main purpose is purely political. It is designed to legitimise a long-term increase in the tax burden, even though few people would regard such legitimisation as remotely necessary. Most of us, from the Blairs' nanny to the Queen Mum, already know that we will have to pay more for any significant improvement in public services.

A light bulb has at last been illuminated in the Treasury, judging by a splendidly fatuous quote, attributed to a Treasury "insider", in a recent edition of the Financial Times: "In the end, it is not possible to be in favour of sound public finances, massive tax cuts and huge increases in public spending - there has to be a debate about priorities." Nooooo. Surely not.

But it is palpably obvious even now, in the absence of any serious political opposition, that the Chancellor and Prime Minister still need reassurance that people are not going to be horrid to them if they put up taxes. Wanless is qualified to give it because he has a good analytical brain (a First in maths, I think) and a chummy Geordie accent. And once upon a time he was a fat-cat commercial banker, so surely he can't be keen to pay more imposts than is strictly necessary.

As it happens, his career would have gone better if he had been more ruthless. He was unceremoniously turfed out of NatWest, where he was chief executive, when the lumbering fatty of British banking was being hunted for takeover. If Wanless had been more in the new Labour modernising mould - viz, willing to sack thousands of additional staff - the bank's financial performance would have been strong enough to ward off the predators. And he would not now be therapist to Brown and Blair, persuading them that they are not regressing into unreconstructed taxers-and-spenders.

But why did it definitely have to be him for the job? Well, any new personal tax to pay for health spending would be the Wanless tax. In other words, the fruits of the tax would go to the wan, and the burden of the tax would fall on the wanless: a socially progressive tax that does what it says on the label.

I wish I could find a reverse-Wanless for the government - a trusted counsellor to take the lead out of Blair's pencil - in respect of its media policy. The PM, I believe, should freeze plans for a new super-regulator for the telecommunications and media industries.

The existing panoply of smaller specialist watchdogs is not as bad as many people argue. If Oftel and the Independent Television Commission, for example, have overlapping interests, there is nothing to prevent them working together.

If some industry reforms are necessary - such as permitting Carlton and Granada to merge - that is no justification for a huge and complex bill on the mind-boggling minutiae of industry regulation. The current system has produced one or two lamentable failures, most notably the appallingly slow roll-out of broadband internet connections. But it is not immediately obvious that a bigger regulator would have been quicker-witted in its dealings with BT, the arch-villain in the broadband debacle.

The main rationale for a super-regulator was that "convergence" was inevitable. In case you have forgotten, "convergence" was the hyper-modish theory that all electronic devices - televisions, PCs, music players, phones, personal organisers and even fridges - would be fused together via the World Wide Web.

The world's biggest merger, of AOL and Time Warner, was carried out to exploit the commercial potential of the incipient virtual world in which the PC is the family hearth and entertainment centre. The British government produced a white paper, A New Future for Communications, which was all about what it needed to do to make sure we were all ripe and ready to be converged.

But the proponents of convergence confused what was technologically possible with what consumers were prepared to buy. Even if consumers can eventually be persuaded to junk their serviceable old televisions for gleaming new converged kit, the multi-media companies have found it harder and more expensive than they expected to provide compelling new products and services.

So convergence has been a disappointingly slow trend. It is happening, but not at a pace that requires the government to devote masses of time and effort to creating a huge new regulatory monster. The launch of Nokia's mobile phone with built-in camera, which allows teenagers to e-mail pictures of their butts to each other, does not suggest to me that we have a serious regulatory lacuna. There are more pressing issues for ministers to deal with.

If you want final proof that convergence will be some time in coming, ask yourself which big British institution is still devoting considerable effort to positioning itself for the "converged" world, even to the point of considering the appointment of a TV person as its new chief executive. The answer is BT. And when BT has at last climbed aboard a bandwagon, you can be sure the band is not broad and that the wagon has stalled.

Robert Peston is editorial director of Quest(TM); www.csquest.com; e-mail rpeston@csquest.com