In most of his recent speeches and interviews, David Cameron has spoken about the significance of the Conservative team. His young group at the top of the party are indeed “the brightest and best” the party can produce. Mr Cameron himself is only 41; his Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is only 47, with four year's experience as Leader of the Opposition behind him; his Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, is only 37; the Tories' one-man think-tank, Michael Gove, is another 41-year-old.

One might have to go back to 1951 to find a comparable team. When the Conservatives came back to power, Churchill became Prime Minister, Eden was Foreign Secretary, Rab Butler was Chancellor as well as being the leading policymaker, and Macmillan was asked to build 300,000 houses.

You cannot beat that as a team, but they had one disadvantage against Mr Cameron's top table - they were on average more than 20 years older. Even so, they dominated British politics until Macmillan retired in 1963. Mr Cameron's team have the zest and energy of youth, but they also have time on their side; they have a potential opportunity to dominate British politics for the next ten years or more, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were able, for better or worse, to do after 1997. Individually they are more than a match for their Labour rivals, department by department and debate by debate.

When a new Conservative administration comes to office it is usually at a time of economic trouble. That was the case when the National Government was formed in 1931, and again in 1951, when Aneurin Bevan had recently resigned in protest against Hugh Gaitskell's Budget. It happened again in 1970, though the Labour Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, had started a recovery, and again in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. If the Conservatives return to power in 2010, as is quite likely, they will again inherit a crisis economy.

One can never be sure about economic forecasts. So far, each stage of this crisis has been seen as the recovery point, only to be followed by an even more alarming stage. One can only offer a more or less plausible expectation. In my lifetime, most recessions have been saucer-shaped, with approximately a four-year period of distress. We are only one year into the most alarming financial crisis since the early 1930s. The Great Depression of those years started as a stock market panic in the autumn on 1929, appeared to be in a recovery phase in the first half of 1930, and then progressed through bank closures to a belated recovery in 1933 and after. Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in November 1932.

If the present crisis should follow a similar four-year pattern, recovery could be expected in the second half of 2011, but such a forecast would be over-precise. However, the American public were made very angry by the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson's initial proposal. He asked to be given $700 billion to bail out Wall Street, entirely at his own discretion. The public response makes it unlikely that the Republicans will win in the November elections, either for Congress or for the White House. The rule of financial panics is that the incumbents have to take the responsibility.

Both the Conservative analysis of the crisis and their new policy proposals are orthodox and realistic. They emphasise the significance of excessive debt, not only private debt, but also the growth of public debt. Here the Tories have an entirely legitimate political target for an Opposition. The annual Budget deficit is now rising from £50 billion towards £100 billion. This limits the freedom of action of the Government. Excessive public debt has an opportunity cost in terms of public policy. It makes it much more difficult to handle a crisis.

There is no doubt that the Prime Minister is personally and directly responsible for the explosive rise in public debt. He was Chancellor at the time when the Treasury policy was changed from “prudence” to “investment”. In the Labour vocabulary investment is another word for expenditure. The motive was political: expenditure was increased in order to win elections in 2001 and 2005. Gordon Brown still dictates the financial policy of the Government. Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, inherited Mr Brown's policies and carries out his wishes.

The Conservatives propose to create a new body which will vet the development of public expenditure, so as to avoid repeating the bubble of debt of the Brown years. That ought of course to be the job of the Treasury; but the Treasury can say “no” to anyone except the Prime Minister. Mr Brown is still their boss, and by all accounts a ruthless one. He has the power to say, “Go and thou goest”. Mr Paulson asked for that power, but was refused by Congress.

The Conservatives are rightly determined to stabilise the British economy. That is their core policy. They know that it will be difficult to achieve. Strangely, there are still many people who have not yet realised the full seriousness of the banking crisis. They think it can be mitigated by increasing public expenditure. The Prime Minister seems willing to do that.

Until the Budget itself has been stabilised, the British economy will remain very vulnerable. There will be a lack of confidence, both in Britain and abroad. As an important trading nation, Britain cannot afford to live on the cliff edge. We need, as the Conservatives argue, to be one of the most creditworthy of the trading nations. Then we shall be able to take our opportunities. Our economy has always worked best when the Budget has been balanced. That was the state of affairs which Mr Brown inherited from Kenneth Clarke in 1997. It took him ten years to throw it away. He should remember that it is always easy to lose trust, but very hard to regain it.

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