Ronald Reagan is dead and Margaret Thatcher is in her dotage. The ideological world that those two leaders created is now slipping away with them.

From 1979 to 2004, the right won the battle of ideas in the western world. Conservatives triumphed because they got the two big issues of the era right: they were in favour of free markets and against communism. But now the right is in disarray because it has found itself on the wrong side of the two dominating issues in contemporary western politics: global warming and the Iraq war.