Sketch: Schools? Prisons? The Meaning of Life? Whatever the Question, Michael Gove is the answer.

Since the moment that exit poll came out, life for Labour’s Blairites has been so unbearable you can hardly blame them for not noticing they won the election.

So busy have they been, arguing about non-nuclear nuclear submarines and the right to shoot terrorists dead on sight, that they appear to have no idea the minimum wage has rocketed, everyone’s getting their tax credit cuts back and there’s dozens of new policies doing the rounds on mental health, addiction and sorting out the life chances of poor children.

And then, on Monday lunchtime, our nominally Conservative Prime Minister set out what appears to be a deep and meaningful commitment to transforming prisons and prisoners. The only thing missing was the D:Ream soundtrack and a crushingly high interest PFI contract to pay for it all.

Fresh from a stroll round Rugby prison, David Cameron came, appropriately enough, to the headquarters of his much loved think tank Policy Exchange, to announce that he would be exchanging yet more policies with New Labour.

As it turns out, the way to sort out prisons is the same way to sort out schools. Get Michael Gove to do it. And conveniently, as the Justice Secretary mulls over which side of the EU question to stand on, there he was in the front row to hear all about his own greatness.

“We are going to bring the academies model that has revolutionised our schools to the prisons system,” the Prime Minister said.

“We want to turn Young Offender Institutions into high quality schools. We want to attract the best talent into our prisons.”

And why stop there? The only way forward is the Gove-ification of the entire apparatus of the state. If committed groups of local parents want to get together to drive their own trains from London to Manchester who should stand in their way?

If eight men lined up at the bar of their local Wetherspoons want to launch airstrikes against Isis we must remove the red tape that holds them back.

If someone down your street desperately needs a new liver and the NHS can’t provide one then just get out there and find one yourself.

The pioneering Teach First program, the one that allows Oxbridge graduates briefly to feel good about themselves spending three years getting bullied by sixteen year olds in inner city schools before getting on with more meaningful careers in management consultancy, will now be rolled out to prisons, Mr Cameron revealed.

He stopped short of revealing its name. We can but hope he realises that CVs are hastily read by prospective employers and ‘Prison First’ is not something anybody wants on them, however brilliant his reforms may be.

In any case, the message is clear: Rob the local newsagents, do a three year stretch, and you too can be a management consultant one day.

There are also to be league tables for prisons, and particularly intriguingly, ‘other tools like payment for performance.’

Performance related pay for prison bosses based on reoffending rates is certainly pioneering, and a giant leap towards the logical end point of simply paying prisoners not to re-offend. The middle man cut out, and the jobs problem solved too. I look forward to the advertising campaign. “Dave thought his life was over the day he walked out of Wormwood Scrubs. Now he’s making £25K a year as a non-rapist.”

There is to be a growing investment in ‘satellite tagging’, allowing prisoners to work during the week and go back into custody at weekends, a sort of 21st century Les Miserables complete with Google Maps. Of course, people want to work, but how many Monday mornings at the Dixy Fried Chicken deep fat fryer would you cheerfully turn up for if you haven’t been allowed the basic human right of six pints of Stella at 5pm on Friday?

It is scarcely worth recording the fact that there is, naturally, no money to pay for any of this. As our Prime Minister wisely observed, “I don’t think we should measure the success of government policy by the amount of money we spend on them.”

How convenient. It it is worth noting though that Mr Cameron is “passionate about building new prisons” and has found £1.3bn for that very purpose. So if £450,000 for an affordable home is out of your reach, you can always beat up a pensioner. But if it’s the one currently leading the Labour Party, you’ll have to join the queue.