DOMINIC SANDBROOK: Labour's greatest leaders were patriots and monarchists. Today, they'd be spinning in their graves

By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:01 EST, 16 September 2015 | Updated: 01:24 EST, 17 September 2015

As we all know, it is often the little things that really tell you about a person. 

Little things, silly things, everyday courtesies honoured or ignored: a birthday forgotten, a card not sent, a National Anthem not sung.

That is why, among a host of blunders in his first few days as Labour leader, it is Jeremy Corbyn's refusal to sing God Save The Queen at the service to commemorate the Battle of Britain that will, I suspect, do him the most lasting damage.

Staying silent: As those around him including Defence Secretary Michael Fallon (far left) , Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford (second left) and wife Lady Nicola (third left) sang the national anthem at the service to commemorate the Battle of Britain this week, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (fourth left) stood silent

Suffused with self-righteous zeal, Mr Corbyn's supporters insist that the anthem furore is a mere triviality. But they are wrong.

It is not a trivial thing, but a little thing. Little things often carry enormous symbolic weight. 

And I think Mr Corbyn's refusal earlier this week to pay lip-service to the monarch says a great deal, not just about the self-righteousness and self-indulgence of his politics, but about the colossal gulf that separates him from the vast majority of ordinary working-class Britons.

When I watched him standing there awkwardly in St Paul's, his lips resolutely motionless while his neighbours sang with patriotic gusto, I thought about a red T-shirt that you can buy from the Guardian website.

'What would Clement do?' asks the slogan, beneath a picture of Clement Attlee, by common consent Labour's greatest prime minister, who led Britain between 1945 and 1951.

Well, the answer is easy. 

Ex-Prime Minister Clement Attlee (pictured) would have sung the anthem, Dominic Sandbrook writes

Clement would have sung the anthem, since Clement was a monarchist.

Delusion

That tells a much wider story. For not only was Attlee a monarchist, he was a major in the British Army, who fought at Gallipoli during World War I, was wounded in Mesopotamia and wore his medals with pride at memorial services thereafter.

Like most Labour leaders through the decades — but unlike Mr Corbyn, who has even talked of abolishing the Army — Attlee was proud to champion Britain's Armed Forces. 

Like his working-class voters, thousands of whom had fought for their country in the world wars, he saw them as a force for good in the world, a bulwark against fascism and oppression.

The single biggest delusion peddled by Mr Corbyn's youthful supporters — and there are, I admit, a lot of them — is the claim that he represents a throwback to a more honourable age, when true Labour men stood up for true Labour values.

But the fuss over the National Anthem shows what rubbish this is. 

Whether Mr Corbyn's acolytes recognise it or not, he occupies a position far outside the historic Labour mainstream, not to mention the mainstream of ordinary British life.

He and his supporters talk a lot about the 'real' Labour Party. 'REAL Labour! OLD Labour!' the hecklers chanted at downcast Blairite MPs after the leadership announcement on Saturday.

But do they even have the faintest idea what the leaders of the old Labour Party, the real Labour Party, stood for? Do they know that the vast majority of them were keen monarchists?

Do they know that it was their beloved Clement who took us into Nato, which Mr Corbyn wants to destroy? Do they know that it was Clement who developed Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, which Mr Corbyn wants to dismantle?

The answer, of course, is no. But I suppose the Corbynistas' ignorance of their own party's history is not that surprising, given that 70,000 of them, according to YouGov, did not even vote Labour in May's General Election.

Labour leader: Corbyn speaks during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday

Few of them, I imagine, know that the first Labour governments under Ramsay MacDonald worked hard to build a close relationship with George V, and that many of MacDonald's ministers, far from being seminar-room republicans, were patriotic working-class supporters of the Royal Family.

Before the first Labour government took office in 1924, many people had feared for the relationship between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. 

Yet the King got on famously with his new working-class ministers.

On one occasion, after the former railwayman Jimmy Thomas had told a particularly dirty joke, the King laughed so hard that he burst an abscess in his lung.

It is hard to imagine the famously humourless Mr Corbyn reducing the Queen to fits of laughter. 

Yet contrary to what you might expect, the relationship between our monarch and her Labour Prime Ministers has always been remarkably warm.

Betrayal

Her father, the taciturn George VI, had always got on well with the equally reticent Attlee, who greatly admired his monarch's courage and stoicism during World War II.

Favourite: Palace insiders have long claimed that the Queen's favourite Prime Minister was Harold Wilson (left), who governed Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Right, our monarch at a horse show last Sunday

As for the Queen herself, Palace insiders have long claimed that her favourite Prime Minister was Harold Wilson, who governed Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

Indeed, when Wilson decided to resign in 1976, he told the Queen in circumstances that would probably strike the Corbynistas as a disgraceful betrayal of socialist virtue.

According to Wilson's own account, he and his wife were staying at Balmoral, where the Queen drove them all to a little country lodge. There, the monarch laid the table for tea, and it was while she was washing up afterwards that Wilson, leaning nonchalantly on a worktop, told her that he was going to retire.

Wilson himself could hardly have been more different from the man who leads his party today. With his old-fashioned pipe and reassuring manner, he worked hard to maintain his image as the champion of the common man, while his hobbies — golf and reading detective novels — would probably strike Mr Corbyn as shameful bourgeois indulgences.

The fact that Mr Corbyn (pictured leaving his London home on Wednesday) refused even to make the small gesture of singing the National Anthem at St Paul's speaks volumes about the sheer wackiness of his world view, Sandbrook writes

But such small-c conservatism was not unusual in what Mr Corbyn's disciples call the 'real' Labour Party.

It was, in fact, the norm. Indeed, Wilson's successor, Jim Callaghan, even singled out the Queen's Silver Jubilee of 1977 as one of the highlights of his political career.

As it happens, Callaghan has a better claim than most to embody the soul of the real Labour Party. 

Born into a naval family in Portsmouth, he left school at 17, never went to university and worked his way up the Labour ranks through the trade union movement.

He understood the quiet, understated monarchism of working-class Britain because he had been born into it. 

Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that it was the ultra-patriotic Callaghan who secured the Trident nuclear missile system for Britain — the very system that Mr Corbyn wants to consign to the scrapheap.

Even the Left-wing Michael Foot, who was nominally a republican, understood the extent of popular patriotism, and got on famously with the Royal Family. 

Everybody remembers the moment in 1981 when Foot turned up to the Cenotaph in a much-mocked 'donkey jacket'. 

Few people, though, remember that his friend the Queen Mother rather liked it. 'Hello, Michael!' she said. 'That's a smart, sensible coat for a day like this!'

The truth is that all of these men, even Michael Foot, would have been horrified by the student union posturing of their latter-day successor.

They knew that the Labour Party has always been a very broad church, that millions of patriotic working-class voters like and respect the Royal Family, and that it would be sheer electoral madness to ignore or insult them.

Proud

They knew, too, that respect for the Armed Forces is often strongest in working-class areas, and that a true People's Party ought to be proud of its voters' patriotism, instead of sneering at it or apologising for it.

By contrast, the fact that Mr Corbyn refused even to make the small gesture of singing the National Anthem at St Paul's speaks volumes about the sheer wackiness of his world view.

After all, can you imagine the American President refusing to sing The Star-Spangled Banner because it glorifies war?

Mr Corbyn is, of course, perfectly entitled to sing or not sing as he likes. We do not live in Joe McCarthy's America, where people lived in fear of being declared insufficiently patriotic.

But the fact that the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, representing the interests of millions of people, cannot rise above his petty ideological prejudices, even at a service for the Battle of Britain pilots, surely says it all about the utter childishness and self-indulgence of his politics.

What would Clement do? Well, I can tell you what he is doing now. He is spinning in his grave.