Keir Starmer just made an astonishingly crass mistake that he will come to regret - Colin Brazier

It was there in the way he talked about the men whose World War One medals he bought at auction. And it was there in his unexpectedly lyrical relationship with our countryside. In particular, I remember the wonder in his voice as he described that morning’s dog walk; coming across a brace of sparring stags in a misty valley bottom as the sun rose.

So for Starmer to say that Farage “doesn’t like Britain” - as the Labour leader did during his conference speech last month - was astonishingly crass.

But it begs the question: how much do any of us love this country any more? How many of us, if push comes to shove, would go to the wall for Britain? What are our own personal red lines? For some British Jews, it is the thought - all too real - that they might be targeted by homicidal Islamists.

For the rest of us, the threat is less existential, often more financial. According to the Adam Smith Institute, eight per cent of young Britons (aged between 18 and 30) are actively planning to emigrate. A fifth have seriously considered doing so.

Everybody, it seems, wants out. And not just the young. The General Medical Council says one in eight doctors are thinking about joining the brain drain. Companies are abandoning the London Stock Exchange to a degree unknown and millionaires are said to be heading abroad at the rate of one every 45 minutes.

The Left insists that talk of an exodus is scaremongering. But consider this unignorable fact. Of the world’s 50 richest cities, only two have fewer wealthy individuals than a decade ago. One is Moscow, currently under drone attack, and the other is London.

There are plenty of people on the Left who think the UK can cope very well without the 11,300 millionaires who jumped ship last year. But class war doesn’t pay the bills. The super-rich no longer see London as a safe haven, either for their cash or their person. Too many videos circulate of Rolex theft and the capital’s creeping lawlessness to keep footloose folk here. They take their taxes, spending and hiring with them.

But it’s not just those who can afford to live anywhere who are thinking about upping sticks. Yes, the rich can avoid tax and are increasingly being tempted in a global competition to lure them. Portugal and Italy have attracted expatriate Brits with the promise of low-tax living. Last month Donald Trump officially launched a ‘gold card visa’ - a fast-track residency scheme for the mega wealthy. Sneer if you wish, but these are people who will be spending their money in American car showrooms and realtor offices and accountancy firms. Welfare states require revenue, and that cash does not - as we know - grow on the magic money tree.

We are, of course, a long way from realising the Sun’s infamous headline warning against a Labour election victory in 1992 (‘Will the last person to leave Britain please switch off the lights’). But what’s remarkable about the feeling across Britain right now, is that it’s not just the most affluent who are most apt to abandon our sinking ship.

The young, often saddled with eye-popping levels of student debt, look at the housing market and think: I will never own a home or start a family. For them Dubai, where their smartphone will never be ripped from their hand by a mugger on an e-bike, looks very attractive.

For middle-class professionals, those doctors who are being lured to Australia, the things they took for granted no longer exert the pull they once did. The VAT increase on private school fees, for instance, has been ruinous. Do not underestimate the impact of this vengeful tax. Many a Briton, vacillating about whether to stay in the UK, has stayed here because the kids were settled in a good school. Some will now no longer feel the same degree of loyalty to a country which - effectively - makes them pay twice for education.

It used to be that people looked at moving, but baulked. Yes, ran the calculation, I could earn shed-loads in Saudi, but Britain is a nice place to live. Or, rather, it was. Before 10m more people in 20 years put our roads, trains, GP surgeries, A&E departments, prisons, schools and housing under unprecedented strain.

Everywhere there is a sense of managed decline, of a country slipping a gear and accepting services more appropriate to a developing nation. It’s not just a repeat of the 1970s. That was bad enough. High taxes, endless strikes, civil strife. But the country then was, at a fundamental level, cohesive. All it took was a change of direction under Margaret Thatcher and the nation found its mojo again.

I don’t think the first woman to be prime minister got everything right, far from it. But she would not have allowed immigration and national debt to rip as they have. She would not have tolerated 6.5m Britons on out-of-work benefits, nor a civil service that point-blank refuses to put the policies of elected politicians into action.

The truth is that something new has happened. I find myself talking to people who, like me, feel British to their bootstraps. Rich and poor. Rural and urban. Who love our country, it’s history and traditions. But who feel that, when they gaze into the future, the future is bleak. They wonder what Britain, whose white inhabitants are on course to be an ethnic minority by 2063, will look like in a generation or two. They like Reform, but feel the damage is done. The nation is irrecoverably broken.G

These unhappy thoughts have coalesced for me this week, as I visit friends in America. As a younger man, I thought twice about moving to the US, where I worked now and again as a TV journalist. What stayed my hand was, among other things, a belief that - at bottom - there was no place quite like the UK.

Certainly, nowhere else I’d want my children to grow up. But now, honestly, if any of my children said they were thinking of taking the plunge, of chasing the American Dream, I’d tell them to go for it. Britain is a sinking ship that I will go down with, but I would understand if my children didn’t necessarily feel that way.