Preparation 'haytch': Justine Greening gives high-speed train a Dickensian feel

Stop HS2 campaigners react as they watch the transport secretary, Justine Greening, give the project the go-ahead. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Charles Dickens's birthday is next month, and let's hope the Commons remembers him properly. He worked for Hansard, and was the greatest of all parliamentary sketchwriters. For me to say I am following in his footsteps would be like Ernie Wise claiming to be in the playwriting tradition of Shakespeare.

I noticed on Tuesday that Justine Greening, the new transport secretary, always referred to the high-speed train, HS2, as "haytch" instead of "aitch" S2. At transport questions, she called it "high speed two" throughout – the result, I suspect, of a word from an embarrassed civil servant. But "haytch" has a good Dickensian feel to it. My mind drifted to the riverside at Putney, Ms Greening's seat, where, clothed in rags and covered in tar and sand, she is mending fishermen's nets. The young hero, Arthur Atkins, has asked her how he might get to Birmingham.

"Haar, tis passage to Brumminum you want, young Harthur Hatkins!" she cackles. "Ye'll need to catch that ketch a-bound for Waterloo! Then tekk the 'orse-drawn Northern line as far as Heuston station, harr, and ye'll be thar in 10 minutes, quick as a knife through dripping, my lovely ..."

I snapped out of the reverie and reflected that most politicians do not actually listen to what they are saying. Well, they do: they have the equivalent of the "seven-second loop" used in radio phone-ins to give the host time to cut out the obscene or libellous. In the same way they can filter out anything that might offend the party whips or their own constituents. But they're not listening to what's left. Take Labour's Barry Sheerman, who wanted more low-cost road engineering schemes which, he said, reduce accidents and so save lives: "They are the best investment and offer the best bang for the buck."

Hmmm. Shortly afterwards we had the Tories' James Grey, who was complaining about the closure of railway booking offices "right across the piste". We are in the Austrian Alps, and a skier is charging down a black run. Suddenly, there in his way is a little hut in which a man in a peaked cap is muttering about a return ticket to Kyle of Lochalsh while a dozen frustrated commuters queue, fuming, right across the piste.

Best of all is when they are so desperate to get it right that they get it wrong. For example, Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem junior minister for women, announced that "a diet is for life, not just for Christmas", which, since Christmas is the time we all stop dieting, is the opposite of the truth. Moments later she was asked about breastfeeding, and the fact that British mothers do less than other Europeans. "I don't want people who can't breastfeed to feel badly about not being able to breastfeed," she said.

I wanted to lean over and yell: "I can't breastfeed, and I don't feel badly at all! I was delighted I didn't have to get up at 3am to feed our children!" It would have done no good. Ms Featherstone was determined not to be gender-specific in anything she said, and risk being a female chauvinist pig. So the remark sailed right through her seven-second loop.