There’s a “grim inevitability” about the discovery that the omicron variant was identified in a developing country, says David Fickling in Bloomberg. The original strain was found in China, delta was picked up in India, gamma originated in Brazil and beta was found in South Africa – only the UK’s alpha variant bucked the trend. This is partly a reflection of the fact that these countries have huge populations. But the main reason is that richer countries are now so “heavily vaccinated” that opportunities for the virus to mutate are limited. The same can’t be said for the developing world.

A high-flying Chinese businessman once told me his secret for happiness, says Cindy Yu in The Spectator: “Before a man is 35, women are tools; after 35, women are toys.” It’s far from an unusual attitude. Mistresses are “as old as sin” in China. In imperial times, the ruler would have hundreds. Polygamy was banned when the communists came to power in 1949, but in the late 1990s, “when China started to get very rich again”, big-shot businessmen and politicians revived the practice. Usually they picked young, pretty, uneducated girls, although one official in Chongqing required his lovers to have a bachelor’s degree. A neighbourhood in Shenzhen was dubbed “concubine village” because it was home to a reported 50,000 mistresses.