Brown should resist his penchant for US gurus.

Gordon Brown is once more in bed - I write metaphorically - with Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian with a particular interest in the 19th century and doyenne of American neoconservatism. He has written an introduction to the British edition of her book The Roads to Modernity and apparently at one time planned to hold the launch party in Downing Street, though this idea was dropped.

Himmelfarb, a teenage Trotskyist, has moved steadily to the right. She is now an extreme social reactionary who argued, in On Looking into the Abyss (1994), that "the beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism, relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity".

What draws Brown to this strange creature is what draws him to the equally strange editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre: the obsession with morality, virtue and respectable behaviour. Himmelfarb detects in British political thought of the 18th and 19th centuries "a moral sense", which ameliorated the raw individualism of Victorian laissez-faire - a sort of Third Way ahead of its time. As she sees it, there were three Enlightenments: the much-overrated French one, and the American and British ones, which are almost forgotten. While the French stood for "the ideology of reason" and the Americans for "the politics of liberty", the British preferred "the sociology of virtue".

But the British Enlightenment was buried by egalitarianism and the welfare state. It has migrated across the Atlantic and joined hands with the American Enlightenment. The result is evangelicalism, "compassionate conservatism", workfare and George W Bush.

If that is the British Enlightenment, many will say, we are well rid of it. Himmelfarb's characterisation of it leads her down alarming avenues. For example, in France, with its nasty, atheistic Enlightenment, "the campaign to abolish torture, like that to expel the Jesuits", was part of "the struggle to impose man's rational will on the environment". In Britain, by contrast, with its virtuous, God-fearing Enlightenment, the campaign to abolish slavery was driven by "humanitarian zeal". Does this make torture acceptable? It would be unfair to suggest Himmelfarb means any such thing, but the attribution of torture's bad name to "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" will reassure Bush.

As for Victorian morality and virtue, more of it was required from the poor than from the rich - an unequal arrangement, to my mind. But I do not wish to pursue an argument about 19th-century history or Himmelfarb's interpretation of it. My concern is with Brown. Like Tony Blair, he collects intellectual gurus, but his are even odder and almost exclusively American. He is one of many Britons besotted with the United States, a country which, from its foundation, has given an appealing account of itself, but not one that quite accords with reality.

We are told, for example, that the extent of charitable giving in America is evidence of compassion and public spirit. In fact, nearly half the donations go to churches which, though they may support some good causes, spend heavily on lavishly appointed premises and corpulent preachers. Again, we are told that America is uniquely democratic. No presidential candidate, however, can win without big-business support.

Moreover, leaving aside turnout figures lower than in British general elections, large numbers, disproportionately black, aren't allowed to vote, because they have criminal records. Yet British commentators go wide-eyed with wonder and admiration whenever black people - who account for 12 per cent of the population and have lived in America for 350 years - reach high public office.

Brown's interest in Himmelfarb derives from the belief, common among British politicians, that the US has some magic formula. Yet a nation that locks up more than two million people can hardly be considered worthy of imitation.

Brown should look for virtue closer to home, and in more recent history. It was embodied in the strength of the public realm and, after the Second World War, in the welfare state. The public realm carried ideals and values of disinterested service and concern for the public good that influenced large parts of the private sector.

Research for Lord Goldsmith's report on citizenship, published last Tuesday, suggests the welfare state - a term all political leaders now tend to denigrate - is still a source of particular pride among those most strongly attached to Britain (Anthony Heath and Jane Roberts: British Identity). But the ideals of the public realm were largely destroyed by Thatcherism. Far from rebuilding them, new Labour seems intent on bringing private sector values further into the public sector. If Brown wishes to restore "a moral sense" to British life, he should start right there.

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