You can spend a substantial proportion of your professional life in pursuit of a subject – British government in my case – observing it, listening to it, following its paper trail, and then suddenly you find you don’t know it as you think you once did.

Thanks to Covid-19, a constellation of question marks has risen above so many national institutions and those who people them, and almost every day since early March the number of unanswered questions has been added to.
I’m not given to theorising, but a “tank theory” of government might fit what we are experiencing – a notion that good government depends on keeping a collection of big containers topped up and regularly replenished, tanks from which country, people and society can draw sustenance and wellbeing.

On what tanks do we depend? An economic, industrial, financial and commercial tank; a health, education and welfare tank; a defence, foreign policy and national security tank; an environmental protection tank; a law and justice tank; a parliamentary and government tank, to name the big ones. Together they flow into a huge tank labelled “CONFIDENCE”.