The big society. The BIG society. The big SOCiety. The big . . . SOCIETY! There were so many mentions of the Prime Minister's "absolute passion" on the evening news on Monday that it was easy to suspect that our new director of communications, TV's Craig Oliver, had duped his former colleagues into conducting a Derren Brown-style experiment that would hoodwink the biddable public into not only thinking the big society was a good thing but also believing they had an inkling as to what it might be about.

Fat chance. Dave has been banging on about it for two years and the message remains blurred. Even the big society minister, Nick Hurd (half-decent left-back; none too clever off the pitch), often finds himself saying to me, "Haven't the foggiest, GD. Better crack on." Not that any of us admits our ignorance of St David's Passion to its creator or the ghastly Steve Hilton (whose repulsiveness was apparent to everyone over a decade ago when one of the Saatchis - it matters not which - blurted out that no one reminded him so much of his younger self than little Steve).

“Why me?" the PM moaned again, tucking into a full plate at a convenient patisserie.

“It's your little ray of sunshine."

“Why do I have to explain everything? Do everything. All. The. Time. The only person who truly gets it is . . . Zucks."

This was not an old-fashioned expletive of the type one might use on dropping a cake but a reference to the social networking baron. A nerd lauded by the PM for transforming society, despite his only achievement being to enable unpopular adolescents the opportunity to discover, via other people's messages and photos, the extent of their unpopularity. Dave loves him, perhaps because at school he was less popular than you might imagine, often having to mess alone until - in an early and possibly hugely influential example of the big society at work - I found myself having to volunteer to invite him to my room for tea.

“Why won't anyone in the cabinet come forward off their own bat, without having to be told, and simply offer to help out . . . ?"

“It's a mystery."

“Baffling. Do you want your cake?"

“Be my guest."

The problem the chomping Dave refuses to address is that there is little political capital to be gained from replacing Labour's nanny state with his own Quaker version.

The difference between telling people what to do and expecting them to do it is minimal. All people really want is to be left alone. Something that both David Davis and Mayor Boris implicitly understand. They refuse to sing from the score for St David's Passion because they know it is full of bum notes.

The PM is inextricably linked with the coalition and the big society and if it turns out that the only people volunteering are those pushing anti-coalition leaflets through letter boxes then he will be out on his ear. And where will that leave us?