For the UK, Covid-19 has been a “teachable moment”. We have learnt that our political leaders are incompetent, our bureaucracy ineffective and our economy fragile. This is not true in all respects: the Treasury and Bank of England have performed rather well. But it is true enough not to be funny.

The UK has the world’s second highest cumulative death rate from Covid-19 per million. The response has been confused, the lockdown came too late and the programme for testing, tracking and tracing still appears a mess. The country is opening up in the hope that it can control the virus, this time. We shall see.

The latest economic forecasts from the OECD are only a little less sobering. Even in its “single hit” scenario, which assumes no further waves of the pandemic, the UK economy would shrink 11.5 per cent this year. With a destructive second wave, the economy is forecast to shrink 14 per cent. Spain is the only OECD member that might experience a larger economic decline this year than the UK.