As we have seen, neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Those values come into play if, for example, the state treats human beings merely as a means rather than an end, or if executive authority is elevated above the law, or if the rights of conscience are subordinated to the sensibilities of groups or the imperatives of society. Conservatives are on guard against big government, while being alert to any abdication of its proper responsibilities to individuals and families; liberals have an overriding duty to protect the most vulnerable, at home and abroad, without allowing the entitlements of the living to burden generations as yet unborn. Our politics would still be recognizable to citizens of the Graeco-Roman polis; we have not improved on the Enlightenment’s injunction to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice for the sake of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just as we still divine the moral law encoded in our hearts and enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. The story of the West is the exegesis of this incomparable, inexhaustible diamond mine of the intellect. The disjunction between Left and Right only enters this story during the French Revolution, when the seating arrangements of the Estates General proved more memorable than the deputies to be seated. Yet the party antagonisms of liberals and conservatives, populists and elitists, progressives and traditionalists, seems to have usurped the political stage to the detriment of the defence of civilisation itself. This has historically been less true in time of war or other emergencies. During the Second World War, the bitter and destructive hostilities between Communist and “bourgeois” parties were temporarily suspended, at least in some of the Allies, in order to defeat Germany and Japan. Similarly, during the Cold War, adversarial politics between anti-Communists of Left and Right was kept within bounds because of the common enemy in Moscow. That came to an end after 1989, since when the polarisation of politics in America and Europe has only intensified. It has become commonplace not only for Democrat and Republican or Labour and Conservative activists, but even for ordinary voters, to exclude anybody of the opposite persuasion from their circle of acquaintance.

How very different, how utterly dismaying is such an uncharitable partisanship from the magnanimous spirit which once animated our great democracies! One example must suffice: that of Benjamin Disraeli. In his Life of Lord George Bentinck, Britain’s first and thus far only Jewish Prime Minister wrote a personal manifesto in the guise of “a political biography”. Disraeli defined his own Conservatism as an expression of what he called “the Semitic principle”: religion, property and “natural aristocracy”. His interpretation of Judaism was the antithesis of the Orthodoxy that his father had already rejected when choosing to have the young Benjamin baptised. Indeed, Disraeli’s “Jewish religion” was unique to him and he devotes an entire chapter of his book to it. But the paradox that made Disraeli’s extraordinary career possible was his leadership of the High Tory backwoodsmen in the House of Commons, after the early death of Bentinck. And the single fact that inspired Disraeli to throw in his lot with these dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries, was Bentinck’s decision to defy his faction of the Tories so that a Jewish MP for the City of London could take his seat without swearing a Christian oath. Disraeli concedes that Bentinck’s motives had nothing to do with his own, but were “in accordance with that general principle of religious liberty to which he was an uncompromising adherent”. The point is that this principle, applied specifically to Jewish civil liberties, was capable of breaking up party or factional loyalties — Bentinck was rebelling against the rebels he had led against Sir Robert Peel over free trade and protection. That sacrifice of career on a matter of principle was also capable of inspiring Disraeli, a man of profoundly liberal sensibilities, to join the most illiberal of the Tories. As a Conservative Prime Minister of a minority government, he would later persuade the Commons to give the vote to working men, though he failed to persuade them to support John Stuart Mill’s efforts to extend the franchise to women. The Victorians invented modern party politics, but they elevated principle above party.