Before the recent fuss about missing personal data and Northern Rock, the main criticism of Gordon Brown inside the Labour party was that he had not yet set out a vision of where he wanted to take the country. Those following the debate were not slow to recall the confession of President George Bush senior that he was not very good at “this vision thing”. Yet he comes out very favourably compared with his son, the present president, who has all too much vision of the wrong kind.

You might expect Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal Democrat court historian, to have been all in favour of vision. In fact, he was very cautious. After praising the visions of Roosevelt, Jefferson, Lincoln and one or two others, he warned that visions were not necessarily good things. Hitler and Stalin had visions. Indeed, Hitler had a vision of a Reich that would last 1,000 years. Bush junior had a vision of Iraq transformed under American sponsorship into a Jeffersonian democracy acting as a beacon to the Islamic world. By contrast, “Bush the elder was a moderate as president and he did not harm the republic”.