There is something almost reassuring about UK's Jacob Rees-Mogg. While other politicians disguise alarming propositions beneath focus-group language, Sir Jacob can still sit in an elegant room and explain, with the manner of a Victorian gentleman discussing the correct port to serve after dinner, that some of Brits may shortly have to die.
"It is not impossible that in the next few years we may face a war," Rees-Mogg said in a video urging Britain to rediscover "Duty and the Stiff Upper Lip." If that happens, Britain will need people to join the armed forces and "go out and do their duty." There may even be circumstances, he continued, where people "have to die to save their country, as seen in wars before."
Well, that has been said before.
The first thing to say is that Rees-Mogg is not entirely wrong. There really are circumstances in which a country must defend itself, and throughout history ordinary men have sometimes had to risk everything because the alternative was conquest. The problem begins when the people rediscovering the romance of sacrifice are conspicuously removed from the demographic normally required to do the sacrificing.
Rees-Mogg was born in 1969, so the recruiting sergeant is unlikely to be measuring him for combat boots. He and his wife Helena do, however, have six children: Peter, Mary, Thomas, Anselm, Alfred and Sixtus. Five are sons. One awaits with interest the Rees-Mogg family contribution to the coming national emergency. Perhaps the forms are already in the post.
This is where the old British class system acquires its peculiar comic genius. The aristocratic ideal once carried a genuine doctrine of reciprocal obligation. Privilege was accompanied, at least in theory and often enough in practice, by duty. The sons of the upper classes went to war. They died in appalling numbers in the First World War, sometimes leading their men over the top. Whatever else can be said about that society, many of those preaching sacrifice participated in it.
If Rees-Mogg wants to revive that tradition, splendid. Revive the whole thing. Bring back the stiff upper lip. Bring back duty. Bring back noblesse oblige. Bring back the principle that the gentleman making the speech goes first, followed smartly by his sons, rather than giving an inspirational address to the lower orders before retiring to check whether the claret has been properly decanted.
Rees-Mogg lives with his family at Gournay Court in Somerset, a Grade II* listed 17th-century house. It is the sort of residence that makes "stately home" an understandable shorthand, although technically it is better described as a substantial historic country house. Reports on the Rees-Mogg family television programme describe the household as having staff, a long-serving nanny and the other pleasant accessories of a life somewhat removed from the average British council estate.
None of that disqualifies Rees-Mogg from talking about patriotism. Wealth does not make patriotism fraudulent, and poverty does not confer a monopoly on courage. But wealth becomes exquisitely relevant when a wealthy man starts discussing the necessity of other people dying.
There is a marvellous General Melchett quality to the whole performance. One can almost hear Stephen Fry in Blackadder Goes Forth, explaining to Captain Blackadder that the latest plan requires magnificent courage, tremendous sacrifice and, fortunately, somebody else to climb out of the trench.
The reaction online was therefore predictable. "Send your kids first" rapidly became one response to Rees-Mogg's sermon on duty. That is crude, but it identifies the vulnerability in his argument rather more efficiently than a seminar on the philosophy of patriotism.
Suppose Britain really does face the war Rees-Mogg fears. Who exactly is expected to fight it? Britain abolished National Service decades ago. Its political class has presided over shrinking armed forces while becoming increasingly willing to discuss military confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power. Now comes the suggestion that the missing ingredient may be a revival of ordinary people's willingness to die.
There is an alternative possibility. Perhaps ordinary people have noticed that modern wars are generally proposed, managed and explained by people whose own children have remarkably good prospects of remaining somewhere well behind the front.
That is why Rees-Mogg's appeal to Ancient Rome is especially entertaining. He argued that willingness to perform one's duty is what allows a country to survive and suggested that Rome's decline was partly connected to the loss of such civic virtue. There is something to the larger historical idea that societies cannot survive indefinitely if nobody believes they owe anything to them.
But Rome's ruling class at least understood the concept of military command as a personal activity. Roman aristocrats did not normally explain martial virtue from a safe studio while outsourcing the unpleasant part to people from Sunderland.
The British upper classes once understood this too. Look at the casualty lists from 1914–18 and the names of Etonians, Harrovians and Oxbridge men are everywhere. Whatever the follies of the generals and politicians who produced that slaughter, it cannot simply be said that the elite preserved all of its own sons while sending only working-class boys into the machine.
That historical memory actually makes Rees-Mogg's argument stronger and simultaneously makes the satire sharper. If he genuinely wants Britain to rediscover duty, the proper response is not necessarily to laugh at duty. Duty is a serious concept. The proper response is to insist upon its universality.
No exemptions for wealth. No exemption because Daddy knows ministers. No conveniently timed postgraduate degree while somebody else's son learns how to clear a trench. If Britain faces an existential war requiring young people to risk death, then the children of politicians, financiers, journalists and generals should encounter precisely the same recruiting sergeant as the children of plumbers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers.
Indeed, if Rees-Mogg really wants to restore the old order, perhaps we could make the arrangement even more traditional. The political class advocating war could form the first battalion.
Imagine the recruiting poster. Sir Jacob stands beneath a portrait at Gournay Court, finger extended in the manner of Lord Kitchener: YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU. Underneath, in smaller print: Sir Jacob regrets that previous engagements prevent his attendance.
That would be unfair, of course. Rees-Mogg has not said that he personally intends to hide from anything, nor has he said that his sons should be exempt from military service. It would be wrong to pretend otherwise. The point is that once a public figure invokes death as a possible civic obligation, people are entitled to ask whether the obligation reaches his own front door.
Perhaps his answer would be yes. If Britain were genuinely invaded and his eligible children volunteered, Rees-Mogg would have considerably more standing to give his lecture about the stiff upper lip. He might even deserve admiration for saying something deeply unfashionable but true: civilisation sometimes survives because people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for something larger than themselves.
Until then, however, the optics are irresistible. A wealthy former cabinet minister, speaking from elegant surroundings, tells a country suffering years of economic and political disillusionment that what it really needs is a renewed willingness to perform its duty and, if necessary, die. Somewhere in Britain a young man paying half his income in rent may reasonably wonder when the governing classes intend to unveil their half of this exciting new social contract.
Perhaps that should be the new definition of national duty. Nobody gets to recommend a sacrifice from which he expects his own household to be insulated.
So, by all means bring back duty, Sir Jacob. Bring back the stiff upper lip as well. Britain could probably use a little more courage, restraint and willingness to serve something beyond the individual.
But bring back the other half of the bargain too. When the bugle sounds, the people giving the speeches should not merely point toward the battlefield. They should have skin in the game.