The controversial historian David Starkey was raised in a Quaker family and, although he is no longer a believer, I think that Quaker background plays a role in some of his views about the military. Soldiers, he said in an election podcast, are neither heroes nor victims. “Today’s soldiers are volunteers. They are doing it because they like it, and they get tremendously excited about it. “And many of them just enjoy killing, and that’s very useful.” Pacifists – as members of the Society of Friends usually are – take the view that all war is wrong. But surely it’s reductionist to make such a generalisation about all men and women who serve in the Forces? People join the Army (the Navy and the Air Force too) for many reasons. There’s always been an element of adventure in soldiering. There has also been a desire for comradeship – and one of the strongest emotions seen in old soldiers is a lifelong sense of memory and mourning for comrades who died in battle. In the First World War there was a rush of perhaps artificial patriotism which prompted men to join up. As for the Second World War, I’ll never forget the late Lord Deedes telling me: “It was an instinct for self-defence. You had a strong feeling – it’s us or them.” Dr Starkey also, I think, draws on his Quaker background when he claims that acts of remembrance, like Armistice Day ceremonies, have become “a crazy religious ritual”, adorned with “poppy fascism”. The Society of Friends disavow rite and ritual. Yet the evidence shows that people need rituals and embrace them, and if these are removed, replacements are invented. David Starkey has sometimes been called “the angriest man in Britain”. He’s actually a clever constitutional expert. But he was born with a physical disability (two club feet, since remedied) and raised as a precious only child. The psychology of his childhood formation, including some of those Quaker values, influences some of these strong opinions, methinks.