I have only just got round to reading Douglas Murray’s excellent book, ‘Neoconservatism: Why We Need It’ (Social Affairs Unit). At a time when neoconservatism is said to be in eclipse, the value of this book lies in setting the facts straight about what it actually is and is not and then showing why it is the only truly moral response to the times in which we live. Murray points out:

•The politically motivated distortion of the work of the US political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the way in which his alleged influence in creating neoconservatism was vastly exaggerated;

•The fact that neoconservatism isn’t at root conservatism at all but was originally a liberal attack on social collectivism;

•Its defining characteristic is moral clarity, and its recognition of the evils of moral collapse both in the domestic agenda of moral relativism and abroad in the morally inverted agenda of anti-Zionism and the appeasement of communism;

•US foreign policy after 9/11 was not dictated by neoconservatism but brought about a confluence of thinking between neocons and old-style conservatives such as George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld;

•The vilification of neoconservatism by so-called liberals in Europe and the US derived from desperation that only the neocons had coherent policies for tackling genocide, dictatorships and human rights abuses while the liberals had none;

•Opposition to the Iraq war was fuelled by moral equivalence, hatred of Israel and a media vendetta which was biased against the west;

•Last but by no means least, neoconservatism is the way forward for the British Conservative party. The Tories must confront the attitude of national slump and fight to preserve what is good in the nation as well as get rid of the bad. As Murray observes, this offensive position appears to have been forgotten by British Conservatives. Indeed it has. The party now marches under the banner of loving Britain ‘as it is’. No more reactionary doctrine can there be. Yet the Tories appear intent at present on taking the path of least resistance to everything, out of terror that they may be thought to be out of tune with the times -- even though those times stand for moral disorder, a flight from reason, cultural self-loathing and appeasement of evil. The current Tory party, indeed, is currently the very antithesisis of the neoconservative ideal.

Murray also delivered a fine address to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam a week ago, in which he pointed out that the unprecedented nature and unfamiliarity of what we are facing in the west was making us blind to its dangers:

The conflict which we are now in – which we have been most visibly engaged in for five years, but which had in truth opened far earlier - is not a conflict which looks familiar to the people of Europe. It barely resembles conflicts of their past. And just as this war does not much look like earlier wars, so victory in this war will not look like earlier victories. This poses a problem: what will victory in the war on terror – the war against Islamic extremism - look like? How will we know when it is over? How will we know when we've won?

The only, and deeply imperfect, guide may be time - the length of time in which we are not hit, seriously threatened or cowed. If we are to have victory then it will emerge as an almost imperceptible victory: it will be a diminuendo towards victory. Only historians will then be capable of determining which battles were vital, which significant, and which illusory triumphs of their time.

The flip-side of this is that defeat in the war on terror – the war on Islamic extremism - will not happen in a familiar manner either. Defeat will not look as defeat would have looked last time. It will rather, I suggest, consist of a gradual accretion of hurts on our society, a wearying accumulation of often minor humiliations: death by a thousand cuts. Rather than waking up one day and finding troops rolling into our cities, we will simply become aware, with a growing sense of numbness, that what we had has slipped away, that what we relied on for support and succour has eroded and washed beyond our reach. If we end in darkness this time, it will be because we shuffled, rather than fell, into it.

You have to look hard to find such moral clarity within today’s British Conservative party -- or indeed most of the British establishment.