The characteristic I most admire in politicians? Petulance

Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more.

Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy Prime Minister; the spat between Liz Truss and Dominic Raab over who gets to stay at Chevening; Angela Rayner’s scathing letter on Commons notepaper to a Brighton shoe shop after it failed to put a pair of £195 heels aside for her; the spectacular Starmer meltdown in February when Sir Keir went ‘puce’ and kept hissing at Boris Johnson ‘It’s not true, it’s not true!’ for all the world like a teenage girl denying rumours of sexual generosity.

For a man of principle, supposedly uninterested in personalities, Jeremy Corbyn was extraordinarily petulant — and his petulance wasn’t amusing, unlike many others. He sulked his entire way through the entire anti-Semitism scandal which poisoned Labour under his leadership, even apparently when listening to Luciana Berger and other female Jewish Labour MPs recount, many in tears while they did so, the vile abuse they’d received on social media from his supporters.

The most petulant politician of the 20th century was of course one of ours — Edward Heath. Delighted to be the prime minister who finally led us into our doomed union with the EU in 1973, he quickly lost his avuncular facade when, defeated at a second successive election in 1974, he was challenged for the leadership of the Tory party by Margaret Thatcher. Though the victorious Thatcher offered him any seat he wanted in the shadow cabinet — an unusual and gracious gesture — he declined, in favour of dedicating the last 30 years of his life to what became known in political circles as ‘the Incredible Sulk’.