Twenty years ago this morning, we woke to devastation. The family were all in the same bed by then, small children having abandoned the howling, creaking terrors of their own room in the small hours after the majestic ancient beech tree crashed on to the end of the farmhouse. Meanwhile, at our end of the building, a big poplar crushed half the porch to powder.

The wind was still strong, and the radio warned people not to go outdoors. The children promptly demanded to climb on the fallen tree, and did so. Our septuagenarian neighbour, standing no nonsense from the elements, was up a ladder fixing his roof, scanty grey hairs streaming in the gale. He and others put us in touch with owners of derelict barns who might have a stock of suitable vintage pantiles for our house (they were so scarce that barter soon began: within days one vet was neutering cats for a fee of 20 tiles).

Another neighbour had a bandsaw and offered to cut up the beech tree into useful bits: one slice was my desk for the next decade. More neighbours turned up to help to haul the poplar off the half-wrecked porch; a gust caught it and it fell and squashed the other half, to rueful merriment. News came of a friend who flatly refused to accept the downfall of his historic mulberry tree, propped it up again, fed it lovingly and saved its life.

It was, for a time, chaotic, and the power and phone were off for weeks; yet there was something life-affirming about the stirring of the antheap, the communal instinct towards recovery, the gallantry of the Welsh linesmen drafted in for long days up the pylons. All the doomy wailing, to be frank, came from London media commentators whose dustbins had blown over.

The other interesting thing – and the political parable – is what was discovered in the succeeding years. With 15 million trees down there was a powerful instinct to clear away the debris: not just fallen timber but stumps and roots. Many land managers did so with slash-and-burn ferocity, driven by an understandable sense that nature must not be allowed to make such a mess. After a while, though, the cannier ones learnt that there was much to be gained by a softer approach: leaving carcasses in situ to return their nutrients to the soil and host insects and wildlife. Our own beech sprouted, not stately and awesome as before but vigorous pale green. One National Trust manager in Kent observes: “We have learnt perhaps to have a lighter touch, not to go in so quickly and think about whether we needed to intervene.”

Well, you get the parable. When things are wrong there are certain necessary actions: safeguard life, reduce immediate harm, put the tiles back. After that you stop and think. Are there promising undergrowths yearning towards the new light? Would a bit of light judicious weeding help them to grow, rather than ploughing everything in and sowing new seed according to a Grand Plan? Do tidiness and symmetry really matter? Might the debris of the past fertilise future growth?

Politicians and administrators should ask these questions more. For the past 20 years there has been a restless, meddling approach to national husbandry. Think of education or the NHS: schemes and systems are set up, then junked or readjusted before they have time to flower. It is like pulling up saplings to measure the roots. Take one small example from the battle for literacy – “Reading Recovery” (RR), an intensive programme for slow readers at 6, had worked in New Zealand and was piloted here in the early Nineties, studies showing rapid improvement within weeks. It was due to become universal but in 1995 the Conservative Government pulled the plug on its funding and designed its own National Literacy Strategy, focusing not on the worst readers but on all children – whether they needed it or not.

Evidence shows that this works far less well, particularly for those in most need. In 1997 Labour looked at bringing back RR – having championed it in Opposition – but decided to refine the Literacy Hour instead. A limited RR now struggles on, scratching the surface, and teachers trained in it can’t get posts. Thus a promising shoot is trampled by the restless boot of innovation. Anyone in education, or the NHS, can give parallel examples.

As for the fertilisation of new growth by letting the past fade gently, the parable holds there, too. Again and again we see how much heritage matters, a sense of neighbourhood and place; we know how socially brutal was the effect of grandiose slum clearance, and by contrast how vigorous are those organisations and neighbourhoods with a comfortable sense of their own past. The Salvation Army has bands and uniforms and the same quaint 19th-century shield logo, yet it is one of the most valuable resources in 21st-century emergencies such as the 7/7 bombing. Trinity House, the lighthouse authority, calls its board “Elder Brethren” in Ruritanian dress uniforms, but it administers lights and seamarks with modern efficiency. The Armed Services struggle on in Iraq and come home to lousy UK housing and callous open hospital wards, but find at least some comfort in regimental or naval traditions going back centuries.

The past is not our enemy; nor are untidy human organisations an evil. Yet bossy meddling and regulation go on, damaging what should grow. The Blair Government showed an almost pathological hostility to the past and the Brown Government still plans, for all its talk of Britishness, to bulldoze acres of decent rundown houses in Liverpool and the North rather than let them be restored and lived in by those who want to do so.

See? Quite a parable. If it’s growing, let it be. If bits of it look a touch mouldy but still work, hands off. Have some humility: let the saplings grow.

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