Call it what you will – the elephant in the room, the dog that didn’t bark, whatever; there was one really rather crucial issue which didn’t much figure in the election debate – the economy. Instead, the campaign focused almost entirely on quality of leadership (which on all sides seemed depressingly lacking), security, public services, social care and who might be best to manage Brexit.

Even on exiting the EU, there was little instructive discussion of where the process might end, and what its impact on jobs and business might be. If seriously contemplating “no deal” as a negotiating tool for securing a decent one, you do at least need a credible plan for such an outcome. Otherwise you end up like Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, vaingloriously threatening an option that everyone knows you have no intention of pursuing. If there is such a plan, we heard nothing about it in the campaign.

Meanwhile, the still deplorable state of the public finances, how to get them back on track, and the myriad challenges facing the country on competitiveness, productivity, trade and rapid technological change hardly got a look in.

In the end the economy is everything, the bedrock on which all else is built. An unstable economy which fails to deliver the rising living standards citizens expect will ultimately floor even the strongest of political and social constructs.