Like a flash of lightning across a darkened landscape, the Covid pandemic has lit up deep fissures in modern society which might otherwise have remained hidden. It has illuminated, for instance, the fact that many workers essential in providing healthcare are among the least rewarded. And in prosperous Britain, children still go hungry. The closing of schools, either for holidays or because of Covid, means that children who relied on school meals for their main daily nourishment are suddenly deprived of it, with all the short- and long- term consequences that malnourishment brings with it. This is just not morally acceptable.

Britain is an unequal society. Boris Johnson’s great contribution to political debate so far has been to identify inequality between different regions of Britain as a central policy issue. He coined the phrase “levelling up” to refer to what needed to be done to reduce social and economic inequalities, and has assigned a whole government department, under Michael Gove, to work towards this end.

But this owes everything to political expediency. Johnson’s decisive victory in the general election two years ago depended on hitherto habitual Labour voters turning their backs on generations of family tradition and voting Tory for the first time. They did so largely because Labour under Jeremy Corbyn repelled them, and because they wanted Brexit done. The so-called “red wall” seats that changed sides were places that had missed out on the prosperity that much of the rest of Britain had enjoyed. They had once relied on heavy industry, but the economy had turned towards the financial service sector concentrated in London and the south east. The north had been neglected. “Levelling up” was the Tory remedy.