There are many tests of leadership. Flick through those endless books with titles such as How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results and you learn about vision, inspiration, innovation, working with a team, setting the pace and facing the odds; from them you are meant to construct a model of what makes a great leader.

You can see how far short of it we are. So many ideals, so few politicians living up to them. I was struck by a conversation with a friend in London last week; he was complaining yet again about a lack of leadership to see us through what he described as “the worst crisis since Dunkirk”. His point (not a very original one) was that on every count,