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When a deadline is missed for Brexit negotiations, it is tempting to think there will be another chance to keep talks going. Last week, the UK and the EU agreed that things needed to be wrapped up by Sunday night or Monday afternoon at the latest. The thinking was that if a deal was not done by then, the return of the Internal Market Bill to the Commons would scupper negotiations. But Monday afternoon passed with no agreement. The two sides now admit that the only real deadline is the end of the transition period on 31 December. The talks are currently in a state of suspended animation. After nine months, the sticking points are the same three issues: the so-called level playing field, fish and governance. Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen each think the other wants a deal.

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an amenability towards doing a spot of teaching? They still seem terribly averse to the whole idea. During the first lockdown, 60 per cent of young children received no virtual lessons at all from teaching staff, and one in five pupils over 12 was given no work to do, according to the Children’s Commissioner. Virtual lessons shouldn’t have been terribly difficult to arrange, but most of the time there were none. My own daughter had no virtual lessons from March to July (which is why she’s no longer in the state sector). She did, however, complete five physics papers and, being scatty, sent them — one after the other — to the wrong email address. Nobody noticed.

Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series of lockdowns and the ruination of everything we once took for granted, we heard that help might be at hand. With the announcement of a Covid vaccine, what the Prime Minister called the ‘distant bugle of the scientific cavalry’ was at last audible. Think Pheidippides staggering into Athens, or the great horn of Helm ringing out. My instinct, and I expect yours, was to think something like: ‘Phew! It’ll take a month or two, maybe a year, but we’re in sight of things going back to normal. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

The first full week of the new national lockdown had the potential to be very difficult for Boris Johnson. Although just 34 Tory MPs voted against this England-wide measure, many more are unhappy about it. They have, as Tory MPs now do when they come across things they dislike, set up a group with a three-letter abbreviation: in this case, the CRG (Covid Recovery Group), which will oppose further lockdowns. Adding to the discontent among backbenchers, No. 10 had just U-turned on extending free school meals into the holidays. Tory MPs were left wondering why — as with exam result appeals — they had bothered taking so much flak from the media and the public if the government was going to give way in the end.