It took the Great British public precisely 24 hours to drive a large Range Rover Sport right through Alistair Darling and his deputy Stephen Ladyman’s proposals for spy in the sky, pay as you go road pricing.

The idea is that you’re charged anything up to £1.34 to use a busy road during the morning rush hour and as little as tuppence to pootle into a rural village at three in the afternoon. In return vehicle excise duty and tax on petrol will be dramatically reduced.

The head honchos at the Department for Transport insist they are not trying to get people out of their cars, claiming that by making people think about what roads they use and when, they will spread the rush hour load more evenly throughout the day.

The thing is though, Darling, if you’re a school cleaner you can think all you like about when you’d like to use the road, but if the job starts at 8.30am you kind of have to be there by then. And what if you want to go to Bristol from London? You can ponder away until the cows come home but you’ll struggle to find a realistic alternative to the M4.

And this is only the start. Teachers and firemen can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve because property prices are too high. Well, under Darling and Man Love’s proposals commuting will be too expensive as well.

And speaking of cost, has anyone actually thought about how unbelievably expensive this scheme might be? At present the big oil companies take £50m or whatever from you and me at the pumps and then send 70% to Gordon Brown, who pops it in the bank. Easy.

What Darling and Man Love are now suggesting, with straight faces, is that Britain’s 32m vehicles will be fitted with a black box full of technology that hasn’t yet been invented, and each of these boxes will be monitored by American military satellites. And then, at the end of every month, every single motorist in the land will be sent a bill.

Along with some speeding tickets, I should imagine, because if they know where you are 24 hours a day, they’ll also know how fast you’re going.

How many people will it take to run all this, to assimilate all the data from space, to deal with the queries from those in hire cars, and visitors from Belgium? It’ll run to the thousands, and they’ll all need health and safety officers and rubber plants and water fountains. And who’s going to pay their wages. Well, er, that’d be you and me.

How can Darling and Man Love not have spotted this? How can two grown men have listened to their advisers and then thought, “Yes, that sounds great. Let’s take it to the public.” Are they mad? I found out, with one phone call to Transport for London that half — half — of the congestion charge is spent on administration.

If Gordon Brown suddenly found that half the revenue from motorists was being spent on rubber plants and civil servants, the National Health Service would stop and he’d have to sell all our tanks.

Darling claims he can’t do nothing, and that he can’t build more roads because this would mean paving over “the whole country”. No it wouldn’t, because John Prescott is getting Barratt and Bryant to do that.

There is some good news though, because at present, with tax on fuel, people who drive large, thirsty cars pay more at the pumps than those who pootle around in small fuel efficient hatchbacks. With the new idea, everyone will pay the same, so you can go ahead and buy the Hummer you’d been dreaming about. This will infuriate eco-mentalists, and that’s dreamy, Except, of course, it won’t be dreamy at all because we’ve had what feels like 900 years of Blair’s barmy army now so we know how the system works. They make a suggestion, about smoking or smacking or hunting or guns or whatever, and then amid howls of protest go ahead and implement it anyway.

So instead of ditching the road-pricing scheme, Darling will insist all his frizzy haired, baggy breasted advisers dream up some ludicrous device whereby people in big cars end up paying £200 a mile while people in hateful hybrids are given free puppies.

This will need another 5,000 civil servants to administer, and then a special squad of armed men to police because people in large cars tend to be clever and will simply mess everything up by driving around with some tin foil wrapped round the aerial on the black box.

In the same way that more foxes have been killed by huntsmen since hunting with dogs was banned, I can pretty much guarantee that if someone puts a Darling and Man Love transmitter in my car I’ll never pay any car tax ever again.

Anyway, the thing is, you voted for Blair so plainly you like the idea of a world where all the animals are equal and all 4x4s come with a free hippie chained to the radiator grille. So I’m sure you’ll be delighted to find that the subject of this week’s column is a small Citroën called the C1.

In many ways, it’s the spiritual successor to the old 2CV, that poisonous upturned bathtub favoured by the sort of hippie who’s currently handcuffed to the tow hook of your Land Cruiser. If Citroën were really on the ball, they’d sell it in CND livery with Save the Whale bumper stickers ready fitted. And maybe get superhippie Steve Hillage to design the upholstery. Man.

Instead they’ve been even cleverer, making a car that is pared to the bone and then shaved. To save development costs it shares a body, a floor, suspension and even an engine with both the new small Peugeot and the Toyota Aygo, the little car in which my colleagues on Top Gear recently played football.

And that was just the start. The rear tailgate is made entirely of glass rather than made from metal with a window glued in place. And there’s only one electric window switch on the driver’s side. To get the passenger window down you have to lean over . . . which is no great hardship since this is not a big car.

I’m reminded in fact of an advertisement Citroën ran many years ago for the 2CV which claimed it had central locking. “You can easily reach all the doors from the driver’s seat.” And that it was faster than a Ferrari. “At 70mph the 2CV will easily overtake a 308 GTS travelling at 68mph.”

There’s that same sense of jokey cheapness in the C1. And yet. And yet. Deep breath. I liked it enormously, because it has something which is sadly missing from most modern cars. Charm.

Oh sure, 0 to 60 takes a week, the ride’s bouncier than a government adviser’s breasts and the boot’s barely big enough for Darling’s IQ, but the interior is a jolly place to be. It even has a docking port for an iPod, and you don’t get that on an S-class Mercedes.

As a station car this would be absolutely ideal, especially when you look at the result of all the cost cutting. It’s only £6,500.

The only problem is quality. Citroëns have an unenviable reputation for breaking down a lot, which might lead you to the door of the identical Toyota Aygo. This is £500 more, which you might think is a small price to pay for that famed Japanese reliability.

But since the two cars are made in the same factory, by the same people, I would therefore save the money and go for the C1.

Then, when the road pricing scheme comes to fruition, with the anti 4x4 big-car bells and whistles in place, it’d be just the right size . . . for driving right up Darling’s backside.

Vital statistics

Model Citroën C1 1.0i Vibe 3dr
Engine 998cc
Power 68bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 69lb ft @ 3600rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual
Fuel 61.4mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 109g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 13.7sec
Top speed 98mph
Price £6,495
Verdict The budget car that proves three into one does go
Rating 4/5

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