There was a cranky call doing the rounds online last week suggesting veterans should turn their backs on Sir Keir Starmer as he laid a Remembrance Sunday wreath.
Naturally I opposed it, alongside many other conservative-leaning commentators. We argued that honouring our war dead is something we should want all the main strands of political opinion to unite behind.
More than one in five people who voted at the general election in July were unrepresented
Of course, this scheme didn’t happen: the vast majority of armed forces veterans would never politicise a service of remembrance for fallen colleagues in that way.
So all the main party leaders joined together to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph and protect an important non-partisan and near-universal social norm, right? Wrong.
Because two important parties were expressly prevented from having their leaders lay wreaths by virtue of the government choosing to maintain an obscure protocol drawn up 40 years ago.
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