Britain’s economic and social challenges are now so monumental that they require a response on a transformational scale. Addressing a failing capitalism and a society grossly disfigured by inequality and collapsing public services rests, above all, on a repudiation of the laissez-faire economics of the past 45 years. But the most serious failure of Conservatism is the despair it has created about Britain’s future. Without a feasible, inspiring vision of our future, we cannot reach first base – a revival of sustained growth.

The prerequisite for growth is investment that drives productivity. That is a truism. Britain does not invest sufficiently. But no business invests in a wider economic, social and political vacuum. Nor, indeed, does government. The heart of the right’s failure is that it has no plausible story to fill this gaping vacuum. The right, with its vision of Britain’s exceptionalism, rooted in lost 19th-century glories of free trade, empire and victory in two world wars, is grotesquely out of kilter with what Britain now is, how contemporary capitalism works and what vision might inspire most of our entrepreneurs and people.

Yet for the past 14 years it has defined the national debate, vainly trying to ape the market-fundamentalist revolution Margaret Thatcher began, and in the process trashing one obvious partial solution to the question. Britain should be part of Europe and its economic and political structures. Instead, Conservatism gave us Brexit, and an attempt to transmute a very European country with social democratic values into a Hayekian utopia. It convinces no one but a shrinking echo chamber of ideological obsessives and cranks.

By contrast, postwar Conservative politicians had lived through the shock of the 1929 financial crash and being forced off the gold standard. They........

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