If Francis Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, he was right about one thing. Back in the scary days of March 2020 as the pandemic first hit the West, Fukuyama made one of the few predictions about Covid that turned out to be correct. It would be clear when the pandemic eventually subsided, he said, that ‘the crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity, and above all, trust in government’.