As everyone knows, says Melanie Phillips in The Times, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. By that standard, Britain’s “unchallengeable attachment” to the NHS is “certifiable”. Waiting lists are at a record 6.6 million. There are a whopping 105,000 staff vacancies. Ambulance waiting times are so high that the NHS “no longer functions even as an emergency service”. For all our lionisation of the institution, other comparable countries get much better health outcomes. We’re in the middle of the pack of 19 OECD nations in terms of healthcare spending, but second bottom for life expectancy and deaths from treatable diseases, and last for survival rates from strokes and heart attacks.

For all its bravado about the need to “maintain influence” in Asia, says William Bratton in Nikkei Asia, Europe has become nothing more than a “bit player” in the region. In part, this “growing irrelevance” is self-inflicted: European leaders who promise a global outlook are invariably stymied by the “brutal suction of home priorities”, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among potential Asian partners. This is exacerbated by the view, popular on the European left, that “Europe has no right to assert itself globally” because of the “complications of history”.