It’s going to take a long time to get better, I know that, and I know not to rush it. I’m very weak. I know to take it easy. Not, for instance, to go back to running the country. But I’m overwhelmed by a sense of the arbitrary. I admit that later that afternoon when it is clear that I am indeed clear, I begin to cry – not altogether selfishly, not just at my own good fortune, but at how unfair it all is. So many people, many younger than me, fitter than me, better than me, poorer than me, are going to die when they don’t need to.

Liam Donaldson, the one-time chief medical officer in England, said: ‘To err is human, to cover up is unforgivable and to fail to learn is inexcusable.’

I don’t have survivor’s guilt. I have survivor’s rage.

*

Not long after I started writing, in the late 1970s, I made a television film called Licking Hitler, which was about a black propaganda unit run from an English country house during the Second World War. Because very few people had heard about the unit’s existence and the filthy work it did, and because the fight against the Nazis had, in myth, always been portrayed as an exclusively noble endeavour, fought with impeccable high principle, the film caused quite a stink.

People were shocked. Who would have thought the British, of all people, would need to sink to lying and libelling in order to fight a just war? Why was it necessary?

In 1978, the question still meant something.

Since then, I’ve kept up my interest in the relationship between public life and untruth. When PolitiFact established by careful research that 4 per cent of claims made by Donald Trump were true, I was taken aback. Really? Was it as much as that?

But after years of thinking about these things, I am still bewildered by the British handling of this latest chapter in our island story. Surely, looking abroad to the examples of Angela Merkel in Germany or Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, something must have stirred inside the head of at least one thinker in Downing Street. Given how well those two leaders were doing, and how badly we were doing, did it really never occur to anyone in power that possibly following their example and levelling with the public might be a more fruitful political tactic?

Not necessarily for the virtue of it – let’s be realistic – but – hey! – just for the efficiency.