There must be few things harder than having an MP for a parent

There is no upside to being the child of a politician, an MP once told me as he explained his reasons for standing down from the Commons. Their parents work long hours, often far from home. They miss birthdays and school plays; family suppers are interrupted by phone calls from the whips, weekends are dominated by constituency events, evenings by late-night votes.

There are the playground taunts (especially if your mother or father has a well-known name), the ridicule if they do something unpopular. And most of these youngsters learn at an early age that they will always come second; to the party, to the public, to the media. Politics is sometimes described as show business for ugly people. Well, politicians might sometimes behave like celebrities, but their children get few of the perks and much of the attention.

Imagine being the teenage Euan Blair, your drunken collapse in Trafalgar Square the stuff of front page news. Or Nancy Cameron, left behind in a pub and straight on to the newsstand. Or Cordelia Gummer, fed a burger as a public health-education exercise during the BSE crisis. It takes an unusual personality to make it to the top of politics: Carol Thatcher was reportedly once ordered to hide in a cupboard by her mother for the crime of wearing jeans in Downing Street when a senior civil servant unexpectedly called round.

Lots of people have parents who are rarely home, or who do things that embarrass them. But not many people have parents with a duty to navigate the country through one of the thorniest political crises in a century. And now, it seems, these children have themselves become targets of Brexit-related abuse.

In some quarters, a belief has emerged that children are fair game simply because they happen to be the offspring of those we disagree with.

To possess the capacity to shout “traitor” in the face of a 12-year-old as he walks home with his father, as happened to Jacob Reesmogg’s son in Westminster on Saturday, is possible only if one has lost the ability to view father and child as human. (Incidentally, to those criticising Mr Rees-mogg for taking his son to the Commons, why shouldn’t he have brought him to see him at work on what had been billed as an enormous day in Parliament?)

Michael Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, knows all too well the response to being on the end of such intimidation: “For the son it must have been a frightening experience…,” she told The Andrew Marr Show. “I have children as well. Occasionally, we do get aggression in the street and it’s quite scary for them.”

Yvette Cooper’s daughter, Ellie, meanwhile, has spoken movingly of what it means to be the child of a politician in our angry, fractured age: “I am scared,” she said recently.

Brexit is the defining issue of our time, an open wound on the soul of our country, which has left many bitter and frustrated. One day, hard as it is to imagine, it will be in our past. And when it is, what kind of nation do we want to live in? One in which we have become so dehumanised, we no longer view those we disagree with as fellow beings, trying their best in difficult circumstances to do what they think is right?

Or one in which we have, at least, retained the human instinct to protect the most vulnerable among us: the children.