THE flat season in Britain and Ireland has been particularly hectic because of you-know-what, and it’s not been easy to find an opportunity to draw breath, let alone put the world to rights. It’s been a while since I’ve aired my thoughts here, but plenty has been happening, and the new landscape we’ve been living in has thrown up a unique set of circumstances, and in some cases new opportunities. But what to make of it all?

On a political level, it’s been clear that a government that seeks to pander to both the weight of public opinion and the demands of vested business and commercial interests looks both foolish and ineffectual, and the way the public have been guided through the current crisis has made Newsnight almost indistinguishable from Chris Morris’s satire Brass Eye. This is a time when the leaders of men should be speaking with one voice, but the reality is that the messages we receive from politicians are incoherent, contradictory and often both.