Hats off to the Chancellor of the checkered party for his rescue planning – that £280 billion package should keep us going until about next Wednesday with a Government that has, unabashed, gone full crony. Even Albanian mobsters are growing concerned that London is reflecting badly on them.

But whatever news conference claptrap is trotted out by the Tory teatime tag team, nothing is getting sorted until we have some effective bug-battler to spritz into our extremities. All this lectern languor and press pontification are nothing but the facile ramblings of busy fools. It’s all one step forward and two steps back with their random, ambling clusterpatch of air-plucked meanderings.

This time, we have a new lockdown-tier combo, and the only certainty is that more businesses will fold, and the economy-air biscuit will slide a little further down the pan. There is no routemap to recovery, only a tapestry of wacko weaves.

Every week is a rollover; a layering of add-ons that achieves little more than cumulative debt of every strain.

And as per the norm, few of the measures really makes sense. For example, in the proposed Tier 2, pubs will be open, but customers will be allowed to buy alcohol only with a substantial meal and will have to leave once they have finished eating. Another unworkable shot from the hip, which will doubtless see already desperate pub landlords arguing the toss with punters who will all be leaving a few chips on their plate. Or the licensees will just plump for the win-win and let everyone booze it up.

It does make you wonder who dreams up this tosh and why they bother. Again, the busy fools are beavering away, likely just shoehorning any old crap into the regulations that at least looks like they are doing something.

The glimmer of hope for us all will be that Gavin Williamson fires up some bent algorithm that downgrades everybody, and we can all revert to our erstwhile happy existences.

Meanwhile, Brexit negotiations are rumbling on, with fish the most conspicuous red herring. Nobody gives a lubed fist about fish, but the last quivering shard of credibility for the charlatan-in-chief will rest on how adroitly it can be filleted and plated. It was after all a highly symbolic motif for the Take Back Control discourse, which is demonstrably risible for a carnival of clowns concerned in chaotic capering. When all is said and done, the whole negotiations piece is about cobbling together one portentous cover story that facilitates a flavoursome face-saver and a package that averts an even greater fiscal faux pas than the calamitous COVID carve-ups on which we have impaled ourselves. And if that cannot be done before the deadline, the whole she-bang will simply roll over.

Pretty much like the whole country has done throughout the year.