“A key tenet faithfully held by self-help types is the first ninety days. Those crucial first three months of any endeavour, they say, tell one all one needs to know. If in the first ninety days, your new colleague habitually shuffles through the door past 9 a.m., pleads to ‘work from home,’ or knocks up Natalya from accounts, then you get a rather lucid picture of the next nine-hundred days…”

Last year, I suggested that we repeal any government which flounders in its first 90 days. We have 1,370 days of this scatological shower to go…