While everyone debates Labour's policies, Anas Sarwar just committed political suicide. He demanded Starmer resign. In Britain, disloyalty is unforgivable. Ask Heseltine. Ask Gove.

From the late sixteenth to the mid twentieth century a tiny island nation in the middle of the North Sea built the biggest empire the world has ever seen. The British Empire covered as much as a quarter of the world’s surface area and extended governorship over more than 400 million people. Loyalty was a cornerstone of this empire. It was expressed as allegiance to the Crown, to the Church of England’s protestant faith and to a shared sense of British identity. It was rewarded with honours and medals and frequently with military protection.

At the grass roots level it was – and remains - a key instrument of leadership. Leaders loyal to their men are rewarded with loyalty. It is a quality capable of building enormous trust, generating great motivation, and creating the basis for very effective performance.

When Admiral Lord Nelson rallied his fleet before the battle of Trafalgar on October 21 1805, he signalled nine carefully chosen words: “England expects that every man will do his duty”. They embodied courage, duty and the deeply engrained sense of loyalty to the Crown, its ships and Commanders on which the Royal Navy had been built.

When Felicia Dorothea Hermans penned the immortal words of her poem, Casabianca: “The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled” she was speaking of this loyalty, in the boy’s case to his father.

When the leader of the Scottish Labour party, Anas Sarwar, chose to publicly demand the resignation of the leader of the National Labour Party, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, at a moment of considerable peril for the government, he committed an act of egregious disloyalty. Most in the country will have winced instinctively. It is highly likely he has made himself unelectable. Michael Heseltine famously stabbed Margaret Thatcher “in the front” in 1990 and despite his efforts, prominence, experience and ability failed to win leadership of the party. Michael Gove performed the same insidious trick on his close colleague Boris Johnson after the 2016 Brexit Referendum and subsequently twice failed to win leadership.

Labour MPs need to recognise that they are part of a team. The time for choices is long past. Overturning their leader now will make of them rats departing a sinking ship. The public, at the most basic level regards this as distasteful, ignoble. The Tories made an art form of it and look what happened to them.

Loyalty is a quality we all understand. It underpins the integrity of our families, the football teams we support and the nations to which we belong. The British people, the Americans and many others besides have grown up with a basic understanding of these sorts of values. Politicians would do well to take careful note. Even the criminal underclass despises a snitch. The electorate is little different.