Does Keir Starmer have a soul?

One of the main arguments against hereditary peerages is that talent and ability are not always passed down across generations. There is much to this. Students of history will know that all the great dynasties see some kind of falloff in capability. Whether the Habsburgs, the Plantagenets or the Kinnocks, the families produce a man – or occasionally a couple of men – of quality, only to see their heirs and successors squander everything.

The same rule exists in a meritocratic age. Someone in a family makes a fortune. The next generation spends it. A generation after that, the family is back to square one. Give or take a generation, and you can follow this rule in all of nature, as well as in the obituaries section of the Daily Telegraph.

It occurs to me that nations behave in a similar way. A country might have a period of acquisition, led by men of ambition – sometimes overarching ambition. Then, over some less determinate period than with families, there comes a generation which decides to spend down those acquisitions. Perhaps we are presently in that generation.

Like many readers, I have spent the past week desperately trying to mug up on the history of the Chagos Islands. Like Adrian Mole at the start of the Falklands conflict, you might have missed them on the map if you were eating fruitcake during the search and dropped some crumbs on your atlas. Still, I followed what debate there was in the House of Commons with interest.

The Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick was among those to question the Foreign Secretary on his announcement about handing over the archipelago to Mauritius, which has close links with China. Jenrick was right to do so, because the question ‘Why would Britain need to keep a set of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean?’ is just the sort the feckless younger son of a minor duke might once have asked.