Right Angle The town square test Friday March 11 2005 18:24 IST Swapan Dasgupta Conventional wisdom deems conservatism and doctrinaire politics to be wildly incompatible. What the much-misunderstood Enoch Powell termed the “community of nation and church”, coupled with old-fashioned common sense, have been at the heart of conservative approaches to politics. Intellectualism and ideological hair-splitting have traditionally been the prerogatives of the Left. No longer. Ever since Margaret Thatcher put the economist Friedrich von Hayek on a pedestal and embraced monetarism, there has been an unspoken rupture between a Toryism that celebrates Edmund Burke and Lord Salisbury, and the...