Mr John Major had to stump up for the reckless withdrawals she had made from the bank of institutional goodwill during the previous decade. Here, however, we must be careful. The Church was a shadow of its old self not so much because of Lady Thatcher as because of its own internal government and administration The same could be said of the BBC under Mr John Birt. Even so, few aspects of the 1980s were so striking as the way in which the then prime minister knocked away the props which had previously supported her party.They were replaced by quangos, by their nature temporary structures, in that they could either be abolished by legislation or be staffed by members of a new, incoming party. Mr Tony Blair and his minions have so far made a few changes of the latter description, but hardly any of the former. We still live in the quango state which Lady Thatcher created.These preliminary reflections have been brought about by another book I have read recently, Mr Hywel Williams's Guilty Men: Conservative Decline and Fall 1992-97 (Aurum Press). Mr Williams's thesis, if I understand him properly, is that for various historical reasons, separate from the inadequacies of the politicians of the 1990s, the Conservative Party is finished, done for.

Or, as Malcolm Muggeridge used to say frequently to me, though it was usually about books and the printed word generally rather than about the Conservative Party: "As dead as a dodo, dear boy."If this indeed turns out to be the case - if, as Mr Williams confidently predicts, Mr Major has "the last Conservative Prime Minister" inscribed on his tombstone - it seems a little unfair to blame him and his colleagues as enthusiastically as Mr Williams does for being the agent merely of a process of historical inevitability: or, at least, of a process which was set in train by their immediate predecessors under Lady Thatcher.Students of this column may have noticed that I take a less apocalyptic view of Conservative prospects. Political parties have a habit of regrouping, re-forming, presenting themselves before our wondering eyes as organisations bearing the same name but commending slightly different principles.A hundred or so years ago it was widely believed that the Liberal Party was "finished". But it returned to power in 1905 (Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman took office a month before the general election of 1906) as a party of social welfare and reform rather than of classical liberalism.After the activities of Mr Tony Benn and others in the early 1980s, it was predicted that Labour would never hold office again. When Lady Thatcher won the 1983 election with a majority of 144, and Labour had only 209 members, these predictions became ever more strident. I can remember Lord Skidelsky writing with all the confidence of a political biographer that, as a force, Labour was finished.It can, of course, be argued that he and others who pronounced similarly were right, sort of. Neil Kinnock began to change the party, John Smith changed it still more and Tony Blair transformed it into something else entirely It was a different party So it was, and is.

The Conservative Party can also be changed into something more appealing, though not, I suspect, by Mr William Hague.There are two broad approaches. The one is in the direction of the European Christian Democrats, in which case the natural leader would be Mr Chris Patten. The other is in the direction of the United States libertarians - of opposition to Mr Blair's priggishness - in which case the leader would probably be someone of whom we had never heard. It would almost certainly not be Mr John Redwood, who is himself on the prim side.It is perfectly possible to combine both approaches - to be at once welfarist and libertarian, as, for example, Anthony Crosland was But Mr Hague shows no sign of adopting either approach He seems to have settled for leading the Patriotic Party.