Philip Green loses ECHR challenge over parliamentary privilege

Sir Philip Green’s human rights were not breached when he was named in Parliament as the holder of an injunction against the Telegraph newspaper, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

The former Arcadia Group chairman took a case to Strasbourg over the use of parliamentary privilege to make information subject to injunctions public.

Sir Philip previously obtained a court injunction preventing the Telegraph from publishing allegations of misconduct made against him by five ex-employees who had agreed to keep the details of their complaints confidential under non-disclosure agreements.

However, he was named in Parliament as the businessman behind the injunction against the newspaper by Labour peer Lord Hain in October 2018, using parliamentary privilege.

Parliamentary privilege allows MPs and peers absolute freedom of speech, meaning they cannot be prevented from speaking in the House of Commons or House of Lords by the threat of libel action, or any other sanction.

In a complaint lodged in April 2019, Sir Philip’s lawyers told justices in Strasbourg that Lord Hain’s statement made his breach of confidence claim against the Telegraph futile, violating his right to a fair trial, and that the statement also breached his right to privacy.

Lawyers for the Monaco-based businessman challenged the absence of controls on the power of parliamentary privilege to reveal information covered by an injunction.

On Tuesday, a panel of eight judges ruled against Sir Philip, finding his right to privacy under Article 8 of the convention had not been violated.

A majority of the judges also found that his complaints brought under Article 6, the right to a fair hearing, and Article 13, the right to an effective remedy, were “inadmissible”.

Fourth Section president Lado Chanturia and Deputy Registrar Simeon Petrovski said: “Given that the national authorities, most notably parliaments, are better placed than the international judge to assess the need to restrict conduct by a member … the court would require strong reasons to substitute its view for that of Parliament.”

The judges added: “Given that parliamentary speech which violates a judgment of a domestic court risks undermining both the judicial process and the constitutional balance between the legislature and the judiciary, there is undoubtedly force to the argument that the scope for restriction should accordingly be greater.

“However, it is not for the court to assess the value of parliamentary speech or its contribution to ‘meaningful debate’.

They later said the background to the case was “undoubtedly of considerable concern”.

The judges continued: “As the United Kingdom Parliament is aware of the problem of parliamentary privilege being used to frustrate injunctions and has addressed the need for further controls, the court considers that for the time being it may be left to the respondent state, and Parliament in particular, to determine whether and to what extent ex ante and ex post controls might be necessary to prevent its members from revealing information subject to privacy injunctions.”

Lord Hain’s disclosure came a day after the Telegraph ran a front-page story saying it was prevented from naming a “mystery businessman”, with the headline “The British #MeToo scandal which cannot be revealed”.

The newspaper later reported that Sir Philip allegedly groped a female executive and bought her silence with more than £1 million, and referred to a black employee “throwing spears in the jungle” while drawing attention to his dreadlocks.

Sir Philip “categorically and wholly” denied being guilty of any “unlawful sexual or racist behaviour”, in a statement issued hours after the peer’s intervention in the House of Lords.

He also previously accused the paper of “pursuing a vendetta” against him and his staff.

The Last of Us season two is fighting with its own video game origins

What comes after the end of the world? That was the central question of The Last of Us, a breathtaking 2013 video game set in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic that leaves the United States a cutthroat wasteland (so different from the America we see today…). It was adapted, in 2023, for the small screen and showed a pathway – a walkthrough, as gamers say – for the tricky act of converting a beloved game into a thrilling, poignant TV show. What, then, comes next? How do you follow up what followed the end of the world? That’s the task for the second season of Sky’s The Last of Us.

Five years have passed since Joel (Pedro Pascal) saved Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the only person known to be immune to the hellish cordyceps virus, from the clutches of militants who wanted to cut out her brain and turn it into a vaccine. Since then, they’ve made a life for themselves in the utopian outpost of Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel is the de facto leader of a community flourishing while the world ends. But not everything is as rosy as it looks. The mushroom folk are evolving, and waves of migrants still wash up at Jackson’s overstretched walls. “If our lifeboat is swamped,” Joel tells his lieutenants, “we leave them out there.” Governing this community isn’t Joel’s only, or hardest, responsibility. That honour falls to the act of playing daddy to an increasingly surly teenage Ellie.

When an act of violence perpetrated by the mysterious Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) shakes Ellie out of her adolescent malaise, the series springs into action. This is a revenge narrative at its core; Ellie and best friend Dina (Isabela Merced) take a 600-mile journey through scenic Idaho in pursuit of Abby and her faction, the Washington Liberation Front (or “Wolves”). “So much for happy proud rainbow town,” Ellie observes, drily, as they enter corpse-strewn Seattle. In the husk of the city, fungal foes are the least of Ellie and Dina’s problems. This is a maze of “levels”; different obstacles the duo must face in their pursuit of Abby, and justice. It is the show’s video game origins necessarily reasserting themselves.

The success of both Naughty Dog’s acclaimed video game series (although the follow-up instalment is considered something of a “difficult second album”) and the first chapter of the show was born out of its sense of vicious realism. The nature of the virus and the disintegration of civilisation – fast in some places, slow in others – was exquisitely captured. The bond between Joel and Ellie was as moving as any platonic relationship on the telly. None of the savagery of the world has been lost in the intervening half-decade: hordes of goofy undead still come sprinting at our protagonists, and brutal new factions emerge in the darkness. As travelling companions, cynical Ellie and luminous Dina have a relationship that’s more romantically charged, but which retains that chalk-and-cheese dynamic. “I was just trying to sound like a badass,” Ellie tells Dina after delivering a trademark barb. “You don’t need to try,” Dina reassures her.

Bella Ramsey – who cut her teeth helping to face down the Night King in Game of Thrones – has been acclaimed by critics in her role as Ellie, if not by the game’s most rabid fans. As ever, the critics have it right. Her character, here, has developed under Joel’s clear tuition, becoming tougher, more stoical and yet losing nothing of that streak of innocence that immunises her against moral collapse. This season’s main additions to the cast – Dever’s Abby, a broken spirit; Merced’s Dina, a gregarious sidekick; Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac, a loquacious psychopath – add depth, even while Pascal is largely absent from the main narrative. This is a well-drawn world, and the population is expanding beyond its compelling protagonists.

Perhaps it’s too fanciful to imagine that a show of this scale and budget would get greenlit without some existing IP, in this case a video game series, to draw from. Those origins are, at times, a narrative drag. After all, in the game, you can die and die and die again, meaning every scenario involves near-certain death. You just reset and go again. But here, the odds are, necessarily, forever in our heroes’ favour. There are no save points in a linear narrative. And yet the show must do enough to appease the 10.3 million people who bought The Last of Us Part II, and whose expensive Sky subscription is possibly predicated on that fandom. And so, the narrative unfolds in a way that owes more to its source medium than its destination genre – building, always, through paths of discovery, towards a showdown.

Is The Last of Us a great TV show, or just a great adaptation of a video game? In truth, it sits somewhere between these positions. Its origins are an unspoken constraint, but showrunner Craig Mazin (and Neil Druckmann, the architect of the game, who co-creates this adaptation) have done a fine job translating for the screen. The world has ended over and over, on screens big and small, but it has rarely been as plausible – or compelling – as the barbaric wasteland of Last of Us’s second season.

‘The Last of Us’ season two begins Monday 14 April on Sky and Now

David Bowie’s daughter paves her own way with debut album release

David Bowie’s notoriously private daughter, Lexi Jones, has released her debut album Xandri.

The 24-year-old artist is the only daughter of Bowie and supermodel Iman, who were married from 1992 until his death in 2016.

The artist took to Instagram to tease her upcoming album, sharing exclusive snippets from songs, and showing clips from her childhood featuring Bowie over the last few weeks.

Xandri was released with no other advertisement and without an announcement last Wednesday (4th April). It features tracks such as “Through all the time”, “Moving on” and “Standing alone”.

With 12 songs, Xandri blends genres such as pop, electronic, and indie rock, all featuring Jones’ vocals. Her ability to glide seamlessly between genres suggests that she holds the same genre-transcending musical habits as her father.

The young artist also writes and produces all of her own tracks. The album’s title, Xandri, comes from the Greek name that means “defender of the people.”

As well as music, she also often takes to social media to showcase her artwork and poetry. Her talents as a visual artist shine through on the album’s cover art, which she designed herself. The artwork shows two faces on the same head splitting away from each other.

Her debut release comes more than eight years after her father’s death. Jones has often paid tribute to him online, posting videos of the pair from her childhood on her Instagram, and also getting matching tattoos with her mother Iman in his memory in 2018.

Lexi Jones is one of Bowie’s two children. His son, Duncan Zowie Jones, is his first-born child with his first wife, Mary ‘Angie’ Angela Barnett. He is a British film director and screenwriter best known for his films Moon and Source Code.

Bowie passed away in January 2016 after a private battle with cancer for months. His 26th studio album, Blackstar, had been released two days prior to his death on January 8th, his birthday.

Bowie’s work will be celebrated next month in Camden in London’s new Live Odyssey immersive experience. The new attraction aims to celebrate British music, taking visitors through a two-and-a-half hour span of six decades of British music, from the 60s right up to today. There will be six different rooms which will each house a different musical era.

His daughter’s album, Xandri, is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

BBC One’s Reunion is a crime thriller with one big twist

There’s never been a TV drama lead quite like Matthew Gurney’s Daniel Brennan before. He’s a big man with a withering stare, wild eyes and an air of volatility. For much of BBC One’s Reunion, he’s an ambiguous figure: is he a hero? An anti-hero? Or simply a villain? As we meet him, he’s emerging from a decade in prison – but even in his exit interview, the world is conspiring against him. Daniel is deaf, but his probation officer has neglected to book a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter, so the conversation plays out as an agitated series of hopeless gestures. The official pointlessly and patronisingly carries on regardless. No part of this process is really designed for Daniel’s benefit – it’s just a box to tick.

This failure of communication signposts the dominant note of this drama. Reunion is, in many ways, a groundbreaking show: set in Sheffield, it’s written by deaf scriptwriter William Mager and many of the production team are also deaf. This has clearly created an environment reflecting deaf people’s experience of living in a world that doesn’t respond to their needs. Daniel is returning to a community where he is a pariah – he was convicted of murdering his hugely popular former friend and sometime mentor Ray (Ace Mahbaz) – but will he be given the opportunity to reconnect with his daughter Carly (Lara Peake) and explain the context of his crime? Indeed, is there any imaginable context in which it could be justifiable?

As soon becomes clear, there’s plenty more to the story than meets the eye; a series of traumas rooted in childhood and never really resolved. Daniel has deprived Anne-Marie Duff’s Christine of a husband and her daughter Miri (Rose Ayling-Ellis) of a father. At first, he finds it impossible to say why – and the suspicions of Christine’s new partner, ex-cop Stephen (Eddie Marsan), make things harder still. Before long, Reunion becomes a story about communication in a more general sense: in narrative terms, Daniel’s deafness is not a bug but a feature. Deafness becomes almost a metaphor for a more general failure to confront the past – a universal omerta about men and their feelings. Is Daniel’s crime rooted in a simple inability to move on?

His deafness is also at the root of his combustibility and trust issues. His struggles for expression underpin his occasional bursts of violence. And the format of the drama carefully brings viewers into this world: long, intense conversations are conducted in BSL and – sometimes, more bewilderingly – in a mixture of gestures and frantic, wordless sounds. There’s a bleak flashback to Daniel’s time in prison. One of the inmates is threatening him and we hear him “speak” conventionally for the first time. His strange, high-pitched yelp is at odds with his menacing appearance. His fellow prisoners laugh and their mockery lays his impotent frustration bare. It’s a rarity to meet a disabled TV character with a latent capacity for violence – but as we see the world through Daniel’s eyes, it’s easy to see why he might feel he has no other options.

The climactic moments are played out almost entirely in BSL; having acclimatised viewers, Reunion goes for full immersion when it really matters. It gives the scenes a real power – the world shrinking around the desperate attempts at communication between two people. The sound design is an important part of this journey and is impeccably done; tiny details – a finger tapping on a table, a frying egg, a dripping tap – are amplified. Voices are alternately clear, muffled and non-existent. At times, it’s difficult to feel fully orientated in this world – and that’s almost certainly the intention.

Because Daniel isn’t at home here either – he drifts from house parties to memorial services, from thwarted moments of domesticity to living out of the back of his car – unable to explain himself or to find closure. At times, Reunion almost feels like a western with Daniel acting out the Lonely Stranger archetype – the difference being that everyone he meets knows Daniel only too well and has already passed judgment upon him.

None of this would work without a fine central performance and Gurney is exemplary – in fact, while the script could occasionally benefit from a greater focus on Daniel’s tormented interior life, Gurney’s expressive face does plenty of heavy lifting on its own. Reunion isn’t an easy watch for a number of reasons – the subject matter is difficult, and the format means full commitment is required. But it is unapologetically itself, and the world it creates is all the more convincing as a result.

The global event bringing fresh energy to planet-positive solutions

As we navigate significant environmental and social challenges, the return of ChangeNOW, the world’s biggest expo of solutions for the planet, is much needed to reinvigorate climate action. The 2025 edition, which will take place from April 24th to 26th, will host 140 countries, 40,000 attendees, 10,000 companies and 1,200 investors.

Visionary leaders, established businesses and start-ups alike will gather to showcase over 1,000 sustainable solutions and groundbreaking innovations in key sectors such as clean energy, biodiversity, sustainable cities and the circular economy.

The ChangeNOW 2025 summit will be held at the iconic Grand Palais in Paris, a nod to the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Reuniting for the occasion will be guest speakers Mary Robinson, the former (and first female) president of Ireland, Laurent Fabius, former French prime minister, Patricia Espinosa, former UN climate chief and diplomat and Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, leading climate scientist and professor – all of whom were in the French capital a decade earlier to help shape the Paris Agreement at COP21.

There may have been obvious setbacks to environmental policy around the world of late, the United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement being a notable one. However ChangeNOW 2025 intends to reaffirm the spirit of Paris, while serving as a catalyst for progress ahead of COP30 and the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC). “Ten years after COP21, ChangeNOW is where leaders and changemakers converge to accelerate the ecological and social transition,” states Santiago Lefebvre, founder and president of ChangeNOW. “Thousands of solutions will be showcased demonstrating that meaningful progress is within reach.”

His message of positive climate action will be supported by a multitude of world famous faces who will be in attendance at the auspicious event. Natalie Portman, Academy award-winning actress, director, author, activist, and producer; Captain Paul Watson, Founder of Sea Shepherd and Ocean Conservationist; Hannah Jones, CEO of The Earthshot Prize and Olympic champion boxer and gender equality advocate Imane Khelif are just a few of the names set to appear at ChangeNOW 2025.

With over 500 speakers and 250 conference sessions exploring climate action, biodiversity protection, resource management, and social inclusion, ChangeNOW 2025 will also hear the insights of acclaimed corporate leaders from Accor, Bouygues, Henkel, Lidl, Nexans, and Saint-Gobain, who will explain how businesses can be the ones to drive real change.

And the event will not only be an opportunity for global policymakers to discuss next steps in climate action, it will also be a platform for nations to showcase local innovations through their country pavilions. Expect impactful solutions from countries including South Africa, The Netherlands, and Ukraine – demonstrating international collaboration on the topic of climate.

In addition to the packed program of speakers, workshops, exhibits and networking opportunities, ChangeNOW 2025 will host the Impact Job Fair on Saturday, 26 April, with over 150 recruiters and training organisations offering in excess of 600 roles. Dedicated to the public and young professionals, the interactive workshops, educational activities, and career opportunities in sustainable sectors on offer aim to inspire the next generation of changemakers.

The summit will also present the annual Women for Change conference and the accompanying portrait exhibition, which showcases 25 women who are set to have a significant positive impact on their communities, countries or on a global scale over the next 10 years. Created in 2021, the Women for Change initiative aims to platform and provide opportunities for women who are leading change around the world but require further recognition or investment to continue their work. The annual flagship event, which takes place on the afternoon of April 24th, offers women the chance to discuss new ideas, network with likeminded people, and also acquire funding to help solidify their leadership, and amplify their impact.

Step outside the Grand Palais and take a few steps to the Port des Champs Elysées, on the bank of the Seine, where the The Water Odyssey village awaits. One of the event’s standout features, the immersive 1,000 m² exhibition is open to the public and highlights solutions to maritime and river sustainability challenges – offering a mix of conferences, interactive displays, and sensory experiences to engage all ages.

For three days, ChangeNOW will transform Paris into the global capital of impact, bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and the public in the pursuit of sustainable progress.

Book your ChangeNOW 2025 ticket here

Trump has made China appear a beacon of free trade

The Chinese Communist Party, apostle of free trade. In a strange new world, that was the strangest thing, as shares crashed in reaction to President Donald Trump’s opening salvo of tariffs in a global trade war.

“The market has spoken,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, writing in English on Facebook – which is, by the way, banned in China. No double standards there, then. Beijing can always keep a straight face when it matters.

Politically, the Chinese government can scarcely believe its luck. It has stepped forward as a voice of reason and stability in a chorus of discord to promote the false narrative that it has been a model of good behaviour since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001, a date that seems destined to live in the textbooks as the peak of globalisation.

The Trump tariffs “are a typical act of unilateral bullying”, complained a spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry.

“This approach disregards the balance of interests achieved through years of multilateral trade negotiations and ignores the fact that the US has long gained substantial profits from international trade,” the spokesperson added.

The official news agency, Xinhua, said the tariffs were “a weapon to suppress China’s economy and trade” and told the United States to stop undermining “the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people”.

It would be a mistake to write off Chinese rhetoric. The regime of Xi Jinping is serious and its actions speak louder than words.

Clue: China has listed “legitimate development rights” as one of its “red lines” in dealing with the US. The term is code for the export-led economic model which has propelled the country to the rank of second largest economy on earth since it joined the WTO.

Understand that and you understand that for China this is existential. There could be no greater contrast to the whirlwind in Washington than the disciplined, efficiently executed responses announced by Beijing in nine statements outlining reprisals that went beyond mere numbers.

Xi himself did not deign to speak publicly, let alone do anything as vulgar as posting on social media in capital letters. The Chinese public would have thought it beneath his dignity.

Untroubled by such niceties, Trump swiftly posted to his followers online that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED.”

With all due respect to the American president, that is exactly what they did not do. The Xi hit list is ominous because it is well-planned and researched. The “Red Emperor” rules a mandarin class of sophisticated operators who do nothing else but study China’s opponents using every intelligence tool at their disposal.

The easy part for China was to impose reciprocal 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports from 10 April. It also suspended six American firms from exporting to China, launched anti-dumping actions in the medical sector and targeted the US giant DuPont with a probe into potential monopoly practices.

The hard part showed just how thoroughly the Chinese had done their work. No penguin islands or weird mathematics here. They banned the export of “dual use” items, which could have military or civilian applications, to 16 US firms, all in the technology sector.

Their key move was to put export controls on seven rare earth elements “to safeguard national security”. It’s on the public record that some of these are vital to US weapons systems.

The list of rare earths included terbium, which is used to enhance the properties of specialised magnets used in guidance systems, satellites and radar. The magnets are integral to the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter, Predator drones, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines.

Then there’s dysprosium, a rare-earth element of which China controls nearly all the world’s supply. It is used to make high-grade magnets that work in super-heated conditions and is found in the newest semiconductors. Other rare earths on the list are vital to jet engine turbine blades. All will now require special export licences.

China and America are thus in a new kind of war over technology and artificial intelligence. Both Joe Biden and Trump tried to choke the supply of advanced semiconductors to Chinese manufacturers, while China is seeking to choke the supply of raw materials to America’s tech champions.

It’s not hard to see how dangerous this could get. The founder of free-trading modern Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, once told me in an interview that “World War Two was caused because of empires and protectionism”.

He recalled that in the 1940s an oil embargo on Imperial Japan pushed its military leaders into war and he warned that if the West tried to isolate China economically “that is bound to lead to conflict”.

Lee was talking in the 1990s, when China stood on the threshold of globalisation. It joined the WTO only after hard-fought talks. But Charlene Barshevsky, who sealed the deal for the United States, later lamented that the Americans failed to use the WTO to punish Beijing when it broke the rules.

That created the belief that appeasement and elite inertia condemned the American working class to decline, the foundation story of Trump’s movement to Make America Great Again. So it is some irony that the Chinese have just filed a formal complaint about Trump’s tariffs – with the World Trade Organisation.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of The Red Emperor published by Headline Press at £25

The US president must stop his ‘Trump Slump’ becoming a global one

Most shocks in capital markets are, by definition, unexpected. They sometimes derive purely from some almost random-seeming shift in market sentiment, albeit with more deep-set fundamental factors at work. The Great Crash of 1929 and the stock market crash of October 1987 – Black Monday – fall neatly into that category.

Others are more clearly understood in real time, but still a shock: the global financial crisis of 2008 is comprehensible from a distance, albeit famously seen as a “black swan” event. Still others are more purely external – Arab nations imposing an oil curfew after the Yom Kippur war in 1973; or whatever bat, pangolin or Chinese lab assistant was responsible for the coronavirus getting loose.

The Trump tariff crash of 2025 is an altogether unusual affair – one of the few such catastrophes to befall the savings and livelihoods of millions of people caused by the stubbornness of one man.

Because it is Donald Trump – and he alone – who is responsible not only for the substance of his reckless shutdown of US trade with the rest of the world, but the deeply flawed design of the tariff schedules, the practically unprecedented suddenness of their introduction, and the incomprehensible rationale for the policy. Certainly, Mr Trump made no secret of his love for – “the most beautiful word” – tariffs.

But the scale and incompetence that has been attached to his attack on trade has stunned and appalled the world. Worse even than that, it has left people confused.

At one point over the weekend, serious analysts were suggesting that Mr Trump actually intended for the markets to crash. In most cases, this was not a product of the over-conspiratorial minds of the Trump cultists, but because the president himself had reposted a story on social media suggesting that he was “Purposely CRASHING The Market”. A White House spokesperson had to state that the president did not, in fact, deliberately wipe some $8 trillion off the world’s stock markets – another unwelcome precedent set by this president.

The question then arises: “What does Mr Trump think he is doing?” The answer is that no one knows, not even the president.

Some, including the president himself in his unorthodox Rose Garden presentation and his secretary for commerce, Howard Lutnick, suggest that it is all about reindustrialising the United States and generating “trillions” of long-term tax revenues. In his address to workers at Jaguar Land Rover on Monday, Sir Keir Starmer admitted that tariffs are “a huge challenge for our future, and the global economic consequences could be profound”.

Less than comfortingly, Mr Trump compares what he’s putting the previously healthy American economy through to a patient undergoing an operation. Others, occasionally also including the president himself, suggest it is merely another of his brilliant negotiating tactics, and point excitedly to the response of nations such as Vietnam, Israel and Argentina offering zero-tariff deals with America – but which would therefore yield zero returns for the proposed new US “External Revenue Service”.

Put simply, it is a matter of “Tariffs bad – uncertainty even worse”. Businesses and households cannot plan in such an environment, and that means that investment will be frozen for weeks, if not months, and a recession becomes ever more likely.

That is one imminent danger. Another is the way that the market contagion has spread from industrial and resources stocks to the banks, with the obvious worry that the trade recession will soon be joined by its evil twin, a credit crunch. As confidence drains from the world economy, companies are nervous about investing, banks are reluctant to lend, and savers will turn to safer havens than equities. Historically, such security was offered by the United States dollar; now, perhaps, not so much.

One of the great ironies in Mr Trump’s plan to boost the American economy is that, within a fairly short time, he will have plunged it into such a slump that he will need to take emergency measures to rescue it – tax cuts, and increasing the US budget deficit to pay for it. The Federal Reserve may find it has no alternative but to cut interest rates – usually a welcome move, but in this case merely proof of the disaster the Trump administration is inflicting on its people.

The net result may be stagflation: above-target increases while economic activity stagnates. It is analogous to what a combination of the Brexit shock and the reckless Truss experiment that crashed the UK economy in 2022 would do. It is that bad.

What can the authorities, including in the United States, do to prevent a slump? Unlike in 2008 and 2020, for example, in most Western economies, there is far less scope for borrowing at sustainable interest rates to support the economy.

In 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister and had to nationalise most of the British banking sector, the UK national debt-to-GDP ratio stood at about 36 per cent. By the time Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were faced with closing down the economy in 2020, it was 85 per cent. It now stands at 95 per cent, and trending higher.

If the present chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has barely enough fiscal headroom to keep to her fiscal rules, she will have to find some convincing explanations about the much more onerous costs of nursing Britain through what we may soon be calling “the Trump Slump”. That, of course, is not even accounting for the real cost of deterring Vladimir Putin and helping to defend Europe (that being another direct consequence of Mr Trump’s election).

Much the best move, and one still hoped for, is that Mr Trump accepts the manifold and genuine offers of constructive negotiations he’s had from world leaders, declares an early “victory” for his tactics, and announces a 90-day moratorium during which new, freer trade deals can be reached across the world.

It would be good news for all. The markets would calm, American voters would no longer fear opening their pension fund statements, and Mr Trump might turn his mess into a miracle of trade liberalisation.

The dangers if President Trump does press on with his mercantilist “medicine” for America are too gruesome to contemplate. At times such as this, what else is there other than optimism?