This year’s Remembrance Sunday set a record. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, no fewer than nine former Prime Ministers lined up to pay their respects at the Cenotaph. There’s a light lick of irony that the occasion was Remembrance Day. Until you saw them there pulling their best solemn faces there were a couple you might easily have forgotten used to occupy Number Ten, and for “might easily” you could freely substitute “would rather”.

It’s not the job of the war dead to add dignity to former Prime Ministers

As some news outlets noticed, this will almost certainly be the last year in which former Prime Ministers are outnumbered at the ceremony by veterans of one of the two World Wars. The reaper’s scythe is going through the latter, and the state of our politics adding to the number of the former, at a similar rate. What will it do for the dignity of this most solemn of national celebrations when there’s nobody there who actually remembers the war; while an ever longer collection of disgraced Prime Ministerial no-marks snakes down the Mall like the queue for a particularly cursed viewing of the Bayeux Tapestry?

The idea of having current and former Prime Ministers will have made a certain amount of sense when their numbers were diluted by the uniformed veterans of war, and when a handful of statesmen would lend the gravity of the office to the occasion. You can see how, perhaps, it offered an opportunity to show how the act of remembrance could transcend party divisions, to indicate the grave succession of statesmanship and the meandering course of history.

But we’re going through PMs like celebrity sex abusers go through injunctions these days. And when you see fresh-faced Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer swallowing stiffly and – for Pete’s sake – Liz Truss, hotfoot from blaming the deep state for her failings to the remainder bins of the nation’s bookshops or delivering orations to half-empty halls of MAGA-hatted Americans, it does not exactly evoke what we might imagine they were thinking when first the ceremony was conceived. The sad bonging of Big Ben, the quivering air, the last post, tears welling in rheumy eyes, the solemn laying of wreaths – and this undignified collection of chancers and maneouverers and flip-flop merchants jostling for the attention of the cameras.

If the presence of former Prime Ministers added dignity to the occasion, that would make some sense. But it’s not the job of the war dead to add dignity to former Prime Ministers. The ceremony is to remind us of the sacrifice of members of the armed services; not to remind us of the wretched former occupants of an ever more trivial and short-lived post.

Sir Max Hastings has argued that the presence of elected politicians diminishes the occasion, and I think he’s right. He goes so far as to say that “no politician of any complexion should attend the commemoration”, and suggests that his Majesty should put the knockers on the practice altogether.

Sir Max and I differ on the matter by only a hair. I don’t think that we need to preclude sitting Prime Ministers from attending, no matter how little we may think of the present occupant of the post. (I’m reminded of a story told of my colleague Charles Moore, who when he was editor of the Daily Telegraph was introduced to John Major. “Call me John,” said Major, affably. “I’ll address you as Prime Minister,” Charles is supposed to have said, before explaining: “Not out of respect for you but out of respect for the dignity of the office.”)

Prime Ministers ought to be there. They carry with them the dignity of the office. While they hold that office, they are the people who will be ultimately responsible for the decision to put our men and women in uniform into harm’s way. There are few if any graver responsibilities of the job, and it can’t hurt – to put it a bit more plainly – to have them spend two minutes a year sitting with a sense of what that responsibility means. It will, you might hope, concentrate the Prime Ministerial mind just a little. That would do them, or at least the office, a favour.

But once they’re out of the job? Once they’re in the land of non-exec directorships, consultancy fees, the after-dinner speaking circuit and the tour of the memoirs, the only favour that attending the cenotaph does is a favour to their egos and to their photo-albums.

Let them instead stand, as the rest of us did yesterday morning, in front of the pregnant silence of the radio, coffee-mug stalled halfway to the lips, and spend two minutes thinking about the vast cruelties of history, and the sacrifice of the war dead, in private. And then let them get on, also in private, with whatever their days hold.