I have by accident watched more than once the Prime Minister’s answer to Ben Bradshaw’s very legitimate question as to why the Germans and Italians have managed their test and trace system so much better than us. He starts with a reflex attack on the naysayers about our test and trace system pretending that it is run by the NHS when, as he must surely know, it is run not by the NHS but by Serco and its failure is the fault of the government and the private sector, not the NHS.

Then he goes into an astonishing and fascinating rant about how it is impossible to get the English to do what they are asked to do because they are ‘a freedom-loving people’ who were responsible for every development of freedom in the last three hundred years. Discuss. Of course, he did Greats not history. And then there is a fatal pause when he was obviously about to say that we were responsible for the development of the Rule of Law, but, in the circumstances, this might have been a touch ill advised, even by his standards, as he is the first Prime Minister who has breached the Rule of Law for three hundred years.

And have the Italians not loved their freedoms too ?