The admirable Rudd is wrong in her rebellion

Amber Rudd is in many ways an admirable character. I know her a bit because she is the MP just down the road from us, in Hastings. She is friendly, hard-working, straightforward and unpompous. She is unlike the average politician, so it is always nice to see her.

It is her misfortune, however, to come from a disadvantaged background. Her family is rich and bigotedly Remainer (her PR brother Roland, an associate of Tony Blair, recently preached from the ski slopes of Davos about how the British people must be made to vote again on leaving the EU). She has always been trapped in a tightly knit gang of fanatical moderates. If she were to break with them, she would suffer social death.

Ms Rudd has now been a Cabinet minister three times, though. She was Theresa May’s home secretary, but was forced to resign because of the “hostile” immigration policy that treated people from the Windrush generation unjustly. After a bit, Mrs May brought her back, at Work and Pensions, so Ms Rudd owes her something. You would think she would know by now that Cabinet ministers must either support government policy in public or leave the government.

Ms Rudd seems blithely unaware of this. She says publicly that she is against a no-deal Brexit, even though it is Government policy to prefer no deal to a bad one. She voted for no-deal by triggering Article 50, yet says she will delay Brexit unless this law is nullified. Now that there is an Independent Group for people of her mind, perhaps she should leave. It would be Hastings’s loss, but at least she would have acted on principle.

Keep the Home Fires Burning was the cheering song sung in the First World War. Quite soon, it seems, we won’t be able to. Last year, the Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, attacked wood-burning stoves as if they threatened the future of the planet. It was even muttered that petrol stations should be punished for selling bags of kindling. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it was toasters.

Now it is the turn of gas cookers. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is seeking to undo its own job title – and damage millions of homes, too – in the name of carbon targets to cut greenhouse gas levels by 80 per cent by 2050. We must all have induction hobs instead.

The presence of living fire in people’s houses is extremely important for human happiness, particularly in rural districts, where it is markedly colder than in the Whitehall departments that like telling us how to live. In kitchens and in living rooms, the flames warm our hearts as well as our food and our limbs.

In my study, where I write this column, the central heating is almost always off to save money, reduce waste and make my mind clearer than is possible in the stifling heat generated by radiators. An open fire burns cheerfully from late October to early May.

The great conservative philosopher, Edmund Burke, built almost an entire political theory on this living warmth. He spoke of binding the political institutions of a nation with “our dearest domestic ties”. If our laws were linked to our family affections, each would be the stronger, he said – “cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres and our altars”. How strong will those affections remain when those hearths are cold, by government order?

We all know that a metropolitan elite has lost touch with the wider electorate. Our political leaders acknowledge the problem. Yet, in practice, this gap between the many and the few keeps growing. Our carbon targets are not based on indisputable calculations of future environmental damage but on politicised speculations. Their benefit is unprovable: the damage they cause is increasingly real. A political party that forces up energy prices and tries to organise our home lives to “save the planet” will rightly be punished by the voters.

Mrs May likes to speak of the “burning injustices” she wishes to correct. This one is starting to burn brightly.

Some compare the case of Shamima Begum to Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. The son went off “into a far country” and wasted all the money his father had given him. He became very poor, so he returned home, seeking help. His father welcomed and forgave him. It is suggested that Britain should do the same to our Prodigal Daughter.

The comparison only half works.

It is right – though very annoying for steady, virtuous people – that we should rejoice particularly about those who have gone astray and returned, and help them. The father in the Gospel puts it beautifully to his good son – “we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother… was lost, and is found”. For this reason, the appalling mistakes that Begum made – starting, remember, when she was only 15 – should, if possible, be forgiven.

But there is a key difference. The Prodigal Son was sorry. As he returned, he said to his father: “I have sinned against Heaven … And am no more worthy to be called thy son.” Begum is not sorry at all. She sees herself simply as claiming her rights. She still attacks Britain. She is still lost. She is not seeking forgiveness, so she will not receive it.