At the conclusion of his book Dr Norman lists certain political disasters that might have been avoided by the application of Burkean thought, and he includes the euro. His memory is short. The most Burkean of Tories — the Hurds, Clarkes, Heseltines, all those who bought into every other middle-of-the-road tenet of Burke's conservatism — actively supported the euro. It was all about the creation of a bigger society, was it not? And I cannot fathom what the author means by the phrase "understood conservatively, markets are not idolised, but treated as cultural artefacts mediated by trust and tradition." A market is not a cultural artefact: it is a place where buyers and sellers meet and exercise the freedom to make a bargain with each other.

Nor do I understand how a claim such as, under the Burkean ideal, "majorities have their say, but minority rights are protected" fits in with the present Prime Minister's idea of conservatism, if he has one, after the same-sex marriage fiasco. That episode also disproves Dr Norman's argument that "parties are thus an institutional corrective to personal, arbitrary or capricious government". 

He may have helped invent the party system, but Burke was a factionalist. The Conservatives who cast themselves in his image are, like him, old Whigs. They are no longer mainstream Conservatives, and neither is Mr Cameron, who is not with them either. Burke will always be the man in the middle, embodying the conflict between what Churchill called "the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority". For all his efforts, Dr Norman does not prove Burke's seminal importance, or relevance, to the conservatism of today.