Unfortunately, it would be very easy now to make the wrong choice. It is, all of a sudden, very tempting for people on the political Left to think that the credit crunch has presented them, gift-wrapped, with a “left of centre moment”. It is true that the taxpayer has had to underwrite the egregious action of bankers who deserved a small fraction of what they were paid. It is true that regulation failed and needs to be better. It is true that governments cannot allow the banking system to fail.

But, when we look through the immediate crisis, the notion of the “left of centre moment” is close to the opposite of the truth. We mustn't forget that, when the credit stopped flowing, the old methods had just been brought into the shop, in need of repair. A decade of performance management and central targets from Whitehall had hit the buffers.

Literacy standards rose quickly at first but the improvement had stopped. Improvements to the health service were once mostly about making the system better - managing hospitals and getting waiting lists down. Now, it is more about helping people who look after their own health to cope with chronic disease.

All the main parties are now facing their Cole-Yaffle moment. They will all have to learn how to cope with higher expectations, no money and the exposed limits of the central State. It looks like the Tories get it. Borrowing a very ungainly term from the Clinton Administration, David Cameron has said that we are entering “the post-bureaucratic age”. The Conservatives have not yet found a popular idiom for this idea.

But a series of technology-literate speeches by both David Cameron and George Osborne show they understand that public services cannot stand apart from the standards to which people have now become accustomed in every other part of their lives.

It would be all too easy for the British Left to divide itself here. It is easy to kid yourself that state intervention in banking has any implications at all for the provision of, say, social care. It's easy to think that state intervention in one place gives you a licence for state intervention all over the place. Forget the post-bureaucratic age. Let the Tories have Professor Yaffle. But that would be a colossal error and the best people in power know it.

In yesterday's White Paper, Working Together, the Prime Minister puts himself on the right side of the argument. The policy in the paper is but a start: a website that will allow us to compare council services; health services to receive an instant verdict from patients. But when this is coupled with giving individuals the budget to buy what they need rather than what the bureaucracy provides, this information will turn into power. This is Professor Cole all over.

The reform document bears the imprimatur of the Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne who, in a series of thoughtful speeches, has argued for the “radical democratic idea that power must be exercised at the lowest possible level”. Mr Byrne is also the minister responsible for power at the highest possible level - the Civil Service. This week the think-tank Reform accused Whitehall, fairly enough, of complete failure on implementing policy, an obsession with process and a lack of personal responsibility. If we are serious about dispersing power, here is the place to start.

The truly fascinating thing about the Civil Service is its systematic ability to take in highly talented individuals, work them hard and turn out nothing very much. In 2007 the Government was preparing to publish a Social Exclusion Action Plan. There was a classic Whitehall argument about which department it ought be housed in. Some of us had the radical idea, based on the success of the Prime Minister's excellent Strategy and Delivery Units, that it didn't need a department. It just needed the best 50 people and a budget to buy in whatever else was needed in the way of advice. You can imagine the reaction when we tried this idea on a senior civil servant. You've never seen a better Nigel Hawthorne impression.

But it's obvious that government doesn't work well enough to meet the ambitions of idealists. When he had his own Yaffle period, Gordon Brown knew this too. At the half-way point between the first episode of Bagpuss and the publication of yesterday's paper, Gordon Brown delivered a first-class lecture to Charter 88 in which he said: “Where there is a public interest there need not be a centralised public-sector bureaucracy always directly involved in provision”.

I have taken the best line to illustrate that the Prime Minister is himself a once-upon-a-time federaliser. But the line is not unfairly ripped out of context - there are plenty more to choose from. The speech is full of the importance of local government and making sure the accountable body is as close to the people affected as possible. The point that Mr Brown was making was that the State is a means, not an end in itself. It is often a good way of fixing problems. But not always and not as a matter of principle.

Seventeen years on, in a world made hardly recognisable by global integration, instant communication and the amazing quality of service in all but the most bureaucratic sectors, the old methods are broken and politicians will need to adapt.

Professor Yaffle once told the story of the wise man of Ling-Po who just wanted to live in peace with his friends the turtles. He pleaded with the locals not to take his turtles for soup but they laughed at him. So, he walked across the wooden bridge from his island to the land, smashing it as he went. The locals laughed harder. The wise man then appeared to walk back on the water. In fact, just beneath the surface, he was using the turtles as stepping stones. The post-bureaucratic age won't be exactly like that, but it will a bit.

Philip Collins is a former speechwriter for Tony Blair