Relief is the overwhelming British emotion after the first days of the Olympics. Rather in the spirit of a dowager of advanced years negotiating a ballroom, everybody is grateful the hair has not fallen down, the gown got torn or a heel come off.

Britain’s self-confidence, especially about big prestige projects, was badly dented by the fiasco of the Millennium Dome, a billion-pound project championed by Tony Blair. The structure was fine but its content proved entirely vacuous, rendering the Dome a symbolic memorial to New Labour.

Before that we had Concorde – costly, flawed and never a commercial proposition; interminable delays to the Eurotunnel rail link; refusal by successive governments to adopt a credible national aviation policy; ditto energy, beyond thousands of subsidised turbines.