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There is about to be a two-phase onslaught on the living standards of those on low-to-middling incomes. On 1 October the energy price cap, for dual fuel, rises from £1,150 to £1,277. This is a rise of 11 per cent, at a time when furlough is ending and just a few days before the £1,000 a year uplift to Universal Credit is removed (which presumably Boris Johnson will not be swanking about in his big speech to Tory conference).

The Australia/UK/US (Aukus) deal for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines is the clearest demonstration yet of the UK’s tilt to the Pacific. It gives the UK a relevance there that will last decades. But, as I say in the magazine this week, there are risks as well. The biggest of these comes not from China’s strength, but its weakness. The Aukus submarines will take years to arrive and the concern is that Beijing tries to get ahead of the new alliances emerging in the Pacific: not only Aukus, but also the ‘Quad’ alliance of the US, India, Japan and Australia.

Has the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee quietly excused itself from its duty of keeping inflation down: namely, keeping the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) close to a 2 per cent target? I ask because the minutes of its September meeting, released today, show little inclination to raise rates from their historic low of 0.1 percent, even though it predicts that inflation will rise above 4 per cent and stay there at least into the second quarter of 2022.

Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end.