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Education and training, fiscal policy, the performance of service sectors such as tourism and insurance, technological innovation, regulation and business law have all been swept up in the Government's competitiveness agenda, which is why the rest of Whitehall has been brought into Mr Heseltine's project.Dr Dobbie hates being seen as the head of some academic University of Competitiveness, a name he uses several times with increasing scorn. These weighty documents have become the flagships of the competitiveness programme. Indeed, the exercise is well on the way to becoming an annual report on British industry and commerce.Detailed work is also done with the help of the DTI, other Government departments, employers' organisations, the Government's regional offices, Training and Enterprise Councils and the DTI's Business Links offices.Dr Dobbie describes the main work as "benchmarking of the economy," which means identifying the best and most competitive practices and persuading the laggards to copy.This involves more than looking at individual industry sectors. Because we have a generic role that covers many different departments in Whitehall, he finds it convenient to draw on us."The unit has now masterminded two white papers for Mr Heseltine and a third is in preparation. I am a civil servant working in a system, but that direct line to Heseltine reflects the reality that he comes to us with a lot of issues where he wants advice. Labour believes it does not go far enough.To sell his message at a political level, Mr Heseltine has established and chairs a Cabinet committee on competitiveness, which has19 members, amounting to almost a full cabinet.Dr Dobbie nevertheless rejects any suggestion that he is running a rival to the Prime Minister's central policy unit, the original Whitehall think tank, or that he is serving a political purpose for his master.He says: "It is not that I am becoming politicised. The competitiveness programme has been dismissed by Mr Heseltine's critics as a passing enthusiasm that will come to nothing, or a vehicle for political self-aggrandisement.

But those attacks are increasingly hard to sustain, perhaps because a more interventionist approach to the problem of national competitiveness has caught the mood of the mid-1990s, reviving ideas that Mrs Thatcher buried because of their association with 1970s corporatism.The CBI, which seethed at the DTI's lack of interest in industry in the 1980s, is appreciative. If I sit in Whitehall and insulate myself from firms I will have cut off a large part of the information flow and feedback that I need."Dr Dobbie has met 500 companies over the past year. But according to other officials, his hardest task has been to inject the rest of Whitehall with the DTI's Heseltine-inspired zeal. The unit's move to the Cabinet Office will give more muscle to push ideas through the rest of Whitehall, outside the DTI.Dr Dobbie is now the only civil servant below permanent secretary level to report directly to Mr Heseltine. But it is not a pure think tank."You can publish white papers and talk to cabinet committees till the cows come home but unless you influence the decisions and actions of people more generally you won't get that improvement of performance," he adds "Whitehall is only part of it. And the man who set it up for him was Edinburgh-born Dr Dobbie, whose previous job had been to run another Heseltine enthusiasm, the Merseyside Task Force. Over the past three years, the 30-strong unit has been at the heart of Mr Heseltine's switch to a more interventionist approach to improving the lot of British industry and commerce.Dr Dobbie says: "He sees us as a think tank, one which can take forward issues and policies and help him to disseminate the competitiveness message. If there was one pet project Mr Heseltine was unlikely to leave behind when he moved from President of the Board of Trade to number two in the Cabinet, it was the competitiveness unit.

He did not have to ring his office to guess that his unit was about to be whisked away from the Department of Trade and Industry to be part of Mr Heseltine's new power base at the Cabinet Office. Dr Bob Dobbie, head of the Government's competitiveness unit, was walking in Benbecula last month when he heard of Michael Heseltine's elevation to Deputy Prime Minister. But Japanese can be forgiven for feeling that in sweltering August, with the temperatures in the hundreds, the heat is finally coming off.. Having won this, the theory goes, the US is now happy to join Japan in tackling the mighty yen - with the added benefit of knowing that those newly empowered insurers will be making a lot of their investments in the US.After months of doom-mongering, Tokyo has suddenly been cheered by a glimpse of a new, almost fairy-tale, happy ending: a bureaucracy galvanised into finally sorting out the bad debt problem; and an export industry, freed from the shackles of the high yen, but rendered sleeker and even more efficient by its period of suffering.There is still a long way to go - and probably several more banking failures - before this golden land is reached.