It is no secret that universities across Britain operate as large businesses, and to a greater or lesser extent regard their students as consumers. This is evident in the emphasis on the student experience that ranges from wanting to provide comfortable accommodation, to fun club nights, to quality teaching and lecture provision.

As other contributors have commented, the pandemic makes a solid case against wading further into economic globalisation because, as the world becomes more interconnected socially and economically, the breeding ground for deadly illnesses like coronavirus becomes an increasingly grave reality.

The defenders of the lockdown, and those who seem complacent in the face of what it might meanfor the future of British citizenship, betray a dangerous glibness about the implications these unprecedented restrictions will have for the guiding, unspoken assumptions that might inform the future of our politics.

Mr. Gove had every right to send his child to this school of his choosing. To shine a light on another, far more ideally-located school, the likes of which the general public should hold in high regard, and then to have sent his own child to a school which – in his wife’s words (journalist Sarah Vine) – ‘is not exactly Sinkhouse High’, is an act of great, and condemnable hypocrisy. To further boast about having sent his child to a “state” school is an act of spin, which does discredit to his profession.

‘This is a very odd plague. It’s rather small in scale, but it’s gigantic in consequences; because we have chosen to inflict a form of economic suicide on ourselves’.

This crisis will force us to look with clarity at who we are and what we value, and we must evaluate our own strengths accurately.

It is true that children shall be returning to an imperfect education system: one that favours spoon-feeding and emphasizes the regurgitation of information.

This classic warning from Huxley was echoed by Lord Sumption on BBC Radio Four last week when he reminded the public that free societies become tyrannies often because the people relinquish their liberties, rather than have them taken by force.