WHERE’S THEIR SENSE OF DUTY?

Not since WW2 has there been a greater need for politicians to pull together. Fat chance when they’re so lacking in public spirit, says DOMINIC SANDBROOK

WHATEVER you think of our vote to leave the EU, there is no doubt that we face some of the most critical months in our nation’s modern history.

Most observers, whether Leavers or Remainers, agree that extricating ourselves from Brussels and charting a newly independent course will be a colossal challenge.

You might have hoped, therefore, that our nation’s politicians would have risen to the moment, putting aside petty differences and coming together in the national interest. What better sign that we are all patriots, and that, like our forefathers, we stand or fall as one united kingdom?

Alas, from the puerile backstabbing of last summer’s Conservative leadership contest to the hypocritical demagoguery of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, British politicians have spent the past year squabbling like spoilt toddlers.

Indeed, I suspect that even if Britain’s greatest enemies had set out to show our politicians in the worst possible light, they would have struggled to devise a spectacle to match the disgraceful exhibition of the past 12 months.

The past two days, however, have marked a new low.

First, the Sunday papers brought reports that some Conservative MPs are openly plotting against Theresa May, which would mean yet another leadership contest in the midst of the Brexit negotiations.

Bickering

Then, after Mrs May invited rival parties yesterday to ‘come forward with your own views and ideas about how we can tackle these challenges as a country’, the Labour leadership reacted with precisely the seriousness and maturity we have come to expect from Mr Corbyn and his cronies — which is to say, none at all.

Instead of constructive suggestions, Labour fell back on its default position of moaning and sniping. It was depressing, but not surprising.

You may well wonder whether our politicians have always been like this. Haven’t they always been like bickering children, obsessed by their own petty ambitions to the exclusion of the national interest?

The short answer is no. Not everything was better in the past, but if the past 12 months have taught us anything, it is that this political generation is probably the least talented, least public-spirited and least responsible in living memory.

There was a time when putting the national interest first came naturally to our political leaders. Just think of the great wartime Coalition formed by Conservative Winston Churchill and Labour’s Clement Attlee in 1940.

As Churchill put it in his first address to the nation: ‘We have differed and quarrelled in the past; but now one bond unites us all — to wage war until victory is won.’

It is true, of course, that the summer of 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s war machine, was a crisis of such gravity that even Brexit pales by comparison.

But what about 1931, when the onset of the Great Depression saw Britain engulfed by a world banking crisis and a catastrophic loss of international confidence? That strikes me as a very pertinent parallel.

In August 1931, with Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government paralysed by splits, George V persuaded MacDonald and the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, to bury their differences and form a National Government to cut spending, stabilise the pound and shepherd Britain through the worst of the Depression.

Then, as now, the air was thick with talk of plots.

But MacDonald, formerly a radical Scottish socialist, and Baldwin, the champion of conservative Middle England, had the selflessness and vision to work together in the interests of the nation.

As a result, Britain emerged from the worst economic crisis of modern times in remarkably good shape. We survived the Thirties without the faintest hint of rebellion, dictatorship or civil unrest, which meant we entered World War II as a united, determined country. The contrast with today’s politicians is only too glaring.

So what has changed? Where are the Attlees, Baldwins and MacDonalds of 2017?

One answer is that far too many modern MPs treat politics as a game, a sort of reallife version of TV shows such as House Of Cards or Game Of Thrones, all back- stabbing, conniving and conspiring.

Some Conservative MPs seem to regard leadership challenges as the political equivalent of cup finals.

Perhaps because they are insulated from the rest of the country by wealth and education, they seem to have completely forgotten that on their decisions depend real people’s jobs, homes and livelihoods.

Patriot

Under Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, the Labour Party has given itself over completely to an increasingly strident politics of moral posturing, its litany of hysterical complaints leavened only with the ruinously expensive bribery of voters too young to remember the chaos of the Seventies.

It says a great deal about the historical illiteracy of Mr Corbyn’s supporters that they like to present their hero as Clement Attlee’s heir. In fact, they could not be more different.

Attlee was above all a patriot, a man who put country ahead of party. He would have regarded Mr Corbyn and his allies with utter contempt.

Like so many men of his generation, Attlee had worn his country’s uniform and seen action at first hand, in his case, on the hellish desert front of Mesopotamia in World War I. And like Churchill, his great rival and colleague, he knew national solidarity meant far more than petty partisanship.

But there was something even deeper than the shared sacrifice of war. Neither MacDonald nor Baldwin had seen action, but both saw politics as a kind of national service.

They had grown up in an era when collective duty meant more than individual ambition, and when there was no greater honour than to devote yourself to King and Country. One anecdote says it all. In 1921, horrified at the huge rise in Britain’s debt during the World War I, Baldwin secretly donated a fifth of his fortune — a staggering £ 150,000, worth £ 6 million today — to the Treasury.

He wrote a letter anonymously to The Times, appealing to the wealthy classes to tax themselves and help reduce the war debt. Saying he wanted to show ‘love of country is better than love of money’, he volunteered 20 per cent of the value of his own estate. It was only many years later that the correspondent was identified as Baldwin.

Sneer

And he took that attitude into Westminster. Love of country mattered more than love of office, the lust of power or even the ties of party.

Could you imagine many of today’s politicians doing that? Can you imagine, say, George Osborne donating his inherited wallpaper millions to pay towards our crippling annual deficit? No, me neither.

The irony is that almost the only modern frontline politician with Baldwin’s sense of duty is our Prime Minister. And it says a great deal about our times that Mrs May’s reticence and quiet decency are treated as handicaps, when previous generations would have seen them as virtues.

Not even Mrs May’s greatest admirers would claim her past few months have been a triumph, and her time in Downing Street may now be numbered in weeks rather than years. Even so, I suspect history books will be kinder to the Prime Minister than to the snobs, pygmies and hypocrites who love to sneer at her.

The tragedy, however, is that Britain is drifting towards a shambolic exit from the EU and a wretched beginning to our new journey as an independent trading nation.

Not since World War II has there been greater cause for our politicians to pull together in the national interest.

The tragedy is that never in living memory have they fallen so depressingly short of the standards we deserve.