The FTSE-100 index of leading stocks is over 20 per cent up since Britain went into lockdown — ‘bull market’ territory. The government borrowed £55 billion in May, nine times more than the same month last year — yet borrowing costs are down, with some investors now paying to lend to an increasingly indebted nation. Who cares if the UK economy will shrink some 10 per cent this year, as our national debt rockets above 100 per cent of GDP? Stocks are up, bond prices are up and the laws of economics have been suspended.

The fate of Hong Kong should make us worried about Taiwan. China’s introduction of a new security law for Hong Kong — which hollowed out the spirit of the ‘one country, two systems’ notion — is a powerful reminder of the importance of sovereignty for the Chinese Communist party. We should ask whether Taiwan is next on the list. In the past few months, as the world battled to control the Covid-19 pandemic, Beijing indulged in increased military activity across the Taiwan Strait.

It is just over three years since the election of Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France. All of Gaul is united against him. All? No! From a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a remote corner of Occitanie, Jean Castex, the irréductible mayor of the tiny commune of Prades (population 6,124), has emerged in a puff of smoke to become the President’s new prime minister. Castex is a previously almost unheard-of regional politician with a name that sounds as if he has leapt directly from an Asterix comic book.

The Prime Minister recently blamed the delay in the resumption of amateur cricket on the ball itself, calling it ‘a vector of disease’. Happily, tests have disproved this. Balls contaminated with Covid-19 showed no trace of it 30 seconds later — and recreational cricketers will be allowed to return to the field from this weekend. Much of the complexity of cricket comes from the interplay between wood, turf and the leather of the ball.