Jeremy Corbyn, “when his party sweeps to power in June, says he will introduce bank holidays to mark the patron saints’ days of all the component parts of the United Kingdom”, observed Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The future Labour prime minister meant to make his party anthem the All Saints’ day hymn: “For all the saints, who from their labours rest.”

The columnist, however, was not alone in noticing that St David’s day, 1 March, St Patrick’s, on 17 March, and St George’s, on 23 April, cluster thickly round the bank holidays for Easter (next year Good Friday being on 30 March and Easter Monday on 2 April). Secular bank holidays fall on May 7 and 28, so “there will scarcely be a full working week left all spring”. This did not alarm the author of a letter published in the Telegraph. “Sri Lanka, my country of birth, has a holiday at every full moon,” Dr Finella Brito-Babapulle pointed out, adding: “The people are happy with very little wealth.” For the general election campaign currently enveloping Britain, that sentence would make quite a high-risk slogan.

In The Independent (which now publishes only online), Matthew Norman was intrigued by the Labour leader’s crystal clear promises about bank holidays compared with his muddy replies to questions about his policy on the Trident nuclear deterrent.