HAPPINESS used to be a cigar called Hamlet, but now it’s the latest fuzzy buzzword from David Cameron.

The Prime Minister has come in for a degree of criticism and some ridicule for his plan to establish an index of wellbeing. It is easy to see why this should be so. Happiness and politics do not often share adjacent seats in the fleapit of life – sorry, the whizzy, 3D super-wide screen cinema of life, complete with bone-shaking surround-sound, all the better to distract you from what is going on outside the cinema.

Anyway, the idea is that the Government should calibrate people’s wellbeing as well as their contribution to economic growth; gross domestic product (GDP) measures only what people spend, not how they feel, Mr Cameron points out, so he is asking the Office for National Statistics to devise ways to calculate wellbeing.

The hecklers and the cynics are not impressed and I am inclined to join their disgruntled ranks; but let’s hold back for a moment. For, if nothing else, this initiative does at least show a Prime Minister trying to think beyond the literal measures of a successful life, and that is an interesting notion.

Mr Cameron’s latest Big Idea, and he does keep having those, is that information would be gathered to build a picture of how life was improving (or not, presumably) and this would help the country to re-evaluate its priorities.

In theory, that would be no bad thing, as too much of life is spent worrying about the graspable and the financial; pausing to wonder how else we could measure life at least makes for a refreshing change, if nothing else.

The problems come when you begin to think a little deeper. For a start, happiness or wellbeing can be hard to define. If you are talking about the everyday needs and requirements of life, money in the pocket, a roof over your head, those can at least be measured; but happiness is defuse and difficult to pin down.

Why are some people content with their lot while others rage against each new dawn and rarely shut up with their complaining until bedtime; why are some people with little to their name seemingly happy while those more handsomely upholstered by fate continue to want more? Who knows and certainly not me, or Call Me Dave, come to that.

As happiness itself can never be pinned down, and should never be entrusted with someone conducting a tick-box survey for the Government, certain aspects of wellbeing can be measured. The trouble, for Mr Cameron, is that these tend to concern the basics of life, the threadbare economics of living on next to nothing – or the state of our mental health, for example.

So will he, in a time of cuts and general gloom, pause while cutting welfare benefits to wonder if this or that cut will harm a person’s wellbeing? I’m guessing not. Then there is mental illness, surely one of the most serious threats to a person’s wellbeing – and, arguably, something the Government could improve; but mental health is difficult and expensive, and often slips down the priority list.

Here’s another thing: doesn’t spending money to evaluate something as woolly as wellbeing sound like just the sort of Big Government interference that Mr Cameron says he doesn’t like?

And here is one more. It might be ungracious to admit it, but doesn’t it grate just a little to hear the posh and the privileged tell the rest of us that wellbeing is about more than just money; easy to say for those who have it, the impecunious might complain.

So is this an idea whose time has come – or merely another distraction; it is a piece of sharp intelligence or something woollier than the M&S knitwear department at Christmas?

The more I think about it, the fluffier it seems.

As it happens, happiness occasionally used to be a cigar called Hamlet, but such combustible treats were discontinued some 30 years ago.