It’s a funny word, traitor. Like gallant or noble, it feels as if it belongs to a previous age, rarely found outside story-books or occasionally war reporting.

And yet it does, from time to time, crop up in British politics. This weekend Andrew Mitchell, the Deputy Foreign Secretary, branded his former colleague Natalie Elphicke a “traitor” for skipping over to the Labour benches and joining Sir Keir Starmer’s party in the middle of last week.

For good measure he also branded Elphicke a “turncoat” in an interview on Times Radio, warning she will be “despised” by her former colleagues and never trusted by her new party because of her decision to defect.

Like Labour MPs who proudly wear “never kissed a Tory” T-shirts, I have always found this kind of behaviour deeply strange, given that in order to win every party must convince voters who currently don’t support them to change their minds.

It would clearly be counterproductive to walk into a........

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