If an excess of debt built with cheap money was the cause of the crisis – and it was – then more debt is not the answer. Aligning their party with this most basic but vital of insights was, as the essential Tory website Conservative Home put it, "Cameron and Osborne's bravest and loneliest decision". When the Tory leadership decided to oppose Gordon Brown's plans to borrow and spend his way out of the "Depression", as the Prime Minister called it yesterday in a revealing slip of the tongue, they were virtually alone in the western world.