Over the past few weeks the newspapers have filled me with some dismay. Some commentators seem to think that the banking crisis also represents a crisis for Conservatism. Principal among them is Peter Oborne in The Daily Mail who wrote last week that the nationalisation of the Banks is a ‘massive blow for those who believe – like David Cameron’s Conservatives – in liberal capitalism’.

In fact, the Conservative Party has always been, at least at times of its greatest success, a pragmatic party, committed, as Michael Oakeshott might have put it, to keeping the ship of state afloat. There is no perfect world to which we are heading, be it a socialist utopia or a liberal vision of enlightened individual autonomy. With this in mind, David Cameron was absolutely right to back the Government during the crisis. He was also right to single out bonuses as an issue of concern as banks are part-nationalised. Since when did Conservatives start believing that failure should be rewarded? When did we ever think that public money should be wasted?

Rather than representing a crisis of Conservatism, the current difficulties actually represent an opportunity. A fundamental reason why the Conservative Party lost electoral appeal in the 1990s was because it became associated with a vision of an atomised society where people would exist in an almost Hobbesian state of nature. This vision of Conservatism was the largely unintended result of a decade when Margaret Thatcher’s Government was forced to take radical and forceful action to reverse systemic economic decline.

But Thatcher in power was far less ideological and far more pragmatic than in now accepted. The late E.H.H. Green’s study, published a few years ago, will undoubtedly be the first of many that take a more balanced approach to the impact of the Thatcher Governments. 

Once the dust has settled, David Cameron will have an opportunity to outline how Conservatives will respond to the enormous social and economic challenges we will face. In his party conference speech he sought to marry the ideas of state, community and individual responsibility. These themes must be developed over the next 18 months. Much of the prosperity of the last dozen years is turning out to have been a chimera – built on public and personal debt. To rebuild our economy we will need much wider and firmer foundations. Cameron’s challenge will be to explain how this can be achieved.