Sex, lies and treachery: it hasn’t gone away

One might feel that treachery is out of date, that the traitor is an old-fashioned creature now left high and dry in the new, global, wired and interconnected world. Try telling that to Ali Abdullah Saleh, scuttling off to Riyadh last week with a lungful of shrapnel. Try telling it to Gaddafi or Mubarak, to Omar al-Bashir of Sudan or Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

One man's Arab Spring is another man's Winter of Discontent, and whether a traitor is a traitor depends on where you stand. It's not a new phenomenon.

For most 18th Century French and American revolutionaries, Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, was one of the fathers of liberty.

For David Pryce-Jones, in his book Treason of the Heart – a grand and polemical survey of 250 years of British traitors, published yesterday – Paine was a fraud who "hated England and everything to do with it" and "did not care how many might fall victim so long as he had his way. For him, liberty was . . . simply the tool most fitted for pulling down the existing order."

Pryce-Jones hasn't much truck with treachery, nor with the postmodern, relativist anxiety to see things from the other person's point of view.

From his point of view, their point of view is self-serving (Paine), sentimental (Wordsworth), blusteringly dishonest (J.B. "There are no secret police in the Soviet Union" Priestley), self-gratifying role-players (the 19th century Arabist Richard Burton, who said "England is the only country where I never feel at home") and many more - Byron the Hellenist, Lawrence of Arabia, Burgess, Blunt, Kim Philby and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.

They all share failings. Sentimentality. Self-delusion. A deep-rooted and, to Pryce-Jones, unreasoning and unreasonable hatred of their homeland.

In some cases, it's almost hereditary. Harold St John Philby was a Foreign Office Arabist who went bush, came to believe the Arab was "definitely superior", and converted to the joyless Wahabi version of Islam which rules over Saudi Arabia and whose shadow indirectly darkens much of the world today. Hardly surprising when his son Kim turned Soviet spy, defector, and KGB functionary.

Treason of the Heart is compelling polemic and, as a bonus, reveals curious linking threads (sexual ambiguity and a love of fancy dress, characterise many traitors – think of Lawrence of Arabia in his robes, or Byron in his Hellenic skirt).

But it raises, of course, as many questions as it answers. After all, every polemicist wants the readers to fight back.

And there's plenty to fight back about here. Lurking in the background is the faint assumption that patriotism is, of itself, a good thing, almost a duty of the citizen.

This can be hard to swallow. Being British – more precisely, and more often than not, being English, because we're usually the ones causing the trouble – is, of course, no more than an accident of birth. There are plenty of people who, accidentally born in Britain instead of being accidentally born somewhere else, don't feel that this is where they belong. But that's no excuse, in Pryce-Jones's terms, for betraying the place; for treachery.

And his arguments are compelling. Britain is a comparatively brilliant model of how to run a civilised society. Our public life is courteous. Our bureaucracies, police and courts are magnificently incorruptible compared with many, even most; and we don't even make a hoo-hah about it. Our liberties are extensive, and anyone who attempts to encroach on them is pilloried.

And the traitors are still with us. They've just turned their coats.

Just look about you. The outcry over the bankers. The anger over the watering-down of the NHS. The fury – for once, the headline-writers are right – over the attack on the poor, the vulnerable, the assaults on higher education. Even the Daily Mail has its role to play, as a sort of stockade where the enemy gather and can be identified, demonised and picked off one-by-one.

The idea of treachery is alive and well, even if the cry of "traitor" is more usually directed at the government, rather than some sneaky figure, his coat-collar turned up, secret naval treaty in his briefcase, dish-dasha in his suitcase or a pocketful of roubles.

Of course, there are those who disagree. They point to multiculturalists, egalitarians, the politically correct, the "self-hating middle classes". But whichever side of the fence they're on, the new, internal traitors are condemned for precisely the reason Pryce-Jones fingers their predecessors' collars: self-delusion, hypocrisy, a hatred of Britain and its perceived values, and a carelessness for other people's lives and feelings.

We still have treachery, if you like; it's just that in the 21st Century, it tends to stay at home.

• Treason of the Heart: From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby by David Pryce-Jones, Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-528-9 ·