The late president also became associated with a couple of bad ideas that helped make the administration of George W. Bush such a disaster. The first was fiscal incontinence; the second is the view that the key to a successful foreign policy is a rigid distinction between good and evil, and a strong military.

The Republican party - with Ms Palin to the fore - is currently decrying the huge deficits being run by the Obama administration. But this is a recent conversion. Ever since the Reagan years, the Republicans have been the party of deficit spending.

Conservatives once believed both in lower taxes and in balancing the budget. Under Reagan, they simply became the party of tax cuts, without any commitment to fiscal responsibility. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's vice-president, admitted as much when he told a cabinet colleague: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." A mystical belief took hold that if you just cut taxes, the economy would grow fast enough to cover the shortfall - or government would shrink, almost by magic. Somehow it would all come right. This drift in Republican thinking was actually profoundly anti-conservative - because it elevated ideology (cut taxes at any cost) over a pragmatic commitment to good governance.

It is the same with foreign policy. Reagan's insistence that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" caused many liberals to wince - but was basically accurate. However, when George W. Bush attempted to emulate Reagan's "moral clarity", he came up with the "Axis of Evil" - a silly concept that led America into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq. President Bush also missed the fact that while Reagan had built up the US military, he had avoided any big wars. Invading Grenada under Reagan was one thing; invading Iraq under Mr Bush turned out to be quite another.

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the "Reagan myth" that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis , and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today's American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.

David Fuller's view I have always thought of myself as socially liberal but fiscally conservative, so I remember being shocked when Dick Cheney said: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." It was one of the factors which caused me to conclude in 2007 that, sadly, the US had become the epicentre of global economic risk. The other main factors were the decline in corporate governance and overstretched military spending. (see also, 'deficits don't matter', 24th July 2007).