STYLE IS NOT everything. It feels heretical to point it out in this age of designer-worship, when leading thinkers bang on about the significance of Prada or the semiotic significance of the parsnip crisp. Sometimes it is necessary to strike one’s head briskly on the nearest wall (without noticing that rag-rolled paint is so yesterday) and repeat the mantra: style is not everything, seeming is not being. Facts, Mr Gradgrind, facts!

The headbanging exercise is particularly useful right now. Blair v Brown, fascinating as it is, is not a substantial conflict, any more than the rows we used to have in my convent school about which Beatle to fancy. Lennon fans saw themselves as intellectual and surreal; Paul girls just wanted to settle down with a sweet-faced man who would never forget to send a padded Valentine card; George Harrison’s followers were spiritual and Ringo-fanciers worryingly maternal. But the group sang on in harmony, out of the same songbook. And so have Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In public, at least, you cannot get a fag paper between their policy aims. Mr Brown has never spoken out against the Dome, the timewasting over foxhunting, the dodgy dossier, the invasion of Iraq; nor against the hideous adventure in Afghanistan that is breaking hearts and bodies daily. The differences between them are footling. Basically, Gordon liked playing rugby at school, and Tony liked playing air guitar. End of story. They’re both responsible.

Leaving aside domestic policy — which is a curate’s egg of success and failure, goodish ideas and woeful administration — they have grave and deathly responsibilities overseas. In Iraq they made us willing instruments in a war that toppled a murderous dictator only to spill more than 42,000 innocent lives and perpetuate instability. The independent organisation that counts violent civilian deaths tells us that in the first year there averaged 20 a day in Iraq; since the announcement that “major combat operations have ended” it has gone up to 36 a day. Iraq’s new Government, so fêted by ours, favours killing too: 27 prisoners, including a woman, were hanged at Abu Ghraib last week within days of the prison being handed over to it. Meanwhile our own young soldiers struggle, suffer and sometimes die.

In the harsh terrain of Afghanistan a separate misery is enacted. After the short-lived Defence Secretary John Reid wrote a sanctimonious letter to journalists explaining, as if to toddlers, that British troops were merely peacekeepers, we have rapidly reached a chaotic situation where Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British Army, cautions that it can “only just” cope. One of the few former soldiers in parliament, Sir Peter Tapsell, adds: “We couldn’t do this job if we had a hundred thousand men there.”

The Prime Minister’s response is to put on a sober tie and speak of “standing firm”, as if he was quelling a Cabinet-room squabble. He also coos about our “capable, committed and dedicated Armed Forces”. So does Mr Brown. Yet note this: neither pays much attention to the treatment of those forces. It has taken Sir Richard to remind us that the military were never brought under minimum wage legislation, and that private soldiers risking death daily in our theatres of war often earn half of that minimum. He spells it out: a man with a year’s training, engaged in Helmand, is taking (or more likely sending) home £1,150 a month —“Is that fair?”

Our soldiers abroad pay tax — unlike US servicemen, and unlike those Revenue-dodging offshore businessmen so dear to party fundraisers. A newly qualified squaddie facing suicide bombers, snipers and rockets round the clock earns two thirds of a British policeman’s wage; in a combat zone the 16-hour watches give an hourly rate of £2.45 and in Helmand, getting off duty after 16 hours is often a pipe dream anyway — fighting goes on for days. After Reid gaily said that they could leave “without a shot fired”, and beetled off to insult the Home Office, they are fighting a confused war in the hardest conditions possible. On peanuts. Even the separation allowance of £6 a day only kicks in after 12 months. Oh, and they pay council tax on their barracks rooms back in Britain.

The Ministry of Defence will no doubt write a stiff letter to The Times saying that it is “looking at a series of options” for improving military pay; but face facts, Gradgrind, facts: the present situation has continued unchanged through nine years of pronouncements about social justice and four years of distant wars.

I relay this not only because it needs underlining, but to make a philosophical point. Governments cannot really change very much in most civilian lives. They cannot really make us eat better or smoke less, have happier marriages or quieter children. All they can do is keep the infrastructure efficient, control predatory malefactors and refrain from gratuitously making our lives difficult. Hard though it is for current ministers to accept, we each retain a lot of leeway to go to hell in a handcart in our own way. We have many daily choices.

But soldiers are different. Service people place themselves under obedience; they agree to be a tool of the State, not to ask questions or flounce off on a whim. Soldiers have to go to war even when they think it’s a nonsense; they are bound by loyalty to their fellows, Queen and country. Politicians are given the awesome responsibility of deploying this human loyalty, and they therefore have a massive duty of care towards the military, who are at their mercy. It is far greater than any imaginary duty to nag the rest of us about our weight, tell us how to think about Islam or pay us compensation for tripping over paving stones.

And they don’t fulfil the duty to the forces. That matters. It matters far more than what Charles said Gordon says about Tony, and whether it might be Alan’s chance. A plague on all their houses.

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