Britain today is a country in whose politics rationalism has run riot for generations, resulting in the atrophy of that "common civilisation" or "common habits of behaviours". The rule of law has been emptied of meaning because laws are mere instruments for the execution of policy. Morality has been emptied of meaning too, because objective rules deriving from tradition or religion have lost their force. And so we are left with rationalism and not much else. David Cameron is obliged to construct his own code of conduct, which has very little to do with common habits or civilisation, but everything to do with rationalist imperatives: saving the planet, building the Big Society, eliminating inequality and injustice. This is a conception of politics that sees it as a series of problems to be solved. Yet that is not the way conservatives have tended to approach politics. "I should say that no problem in politics is ever solved permanently," Oakeshott writes to Popper, "and that no problem in politics should ever be allowed to get out of proportion & to exclude the real business of politics — which is to keep the society as a whole, in all its arrangements, coherent and stable as well as progressive." The Prime Minister is an optimist; he offers leadership: very well. But let him not be tempted by the spirit of Utopia. Let him not be deaf to what Oakeshott called "the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind", the accumulated wisdom embodied in ancient institutions: parliament, monarchy, matrimony. Let him listen to the real hopes of the British people: past, present and future. Above all, let David Cameron behave like the gentleman he ought to be, defending the civilisation that has made him who and what he is. "England expects that every man will do his duty," signalled Nelson at Trafalgar. David Cameron's task is to tell us what that duty should now be, and to set an example by doing it.