One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that we urgently needed more politicians with backgrounds in science, maths and engineering, and fewer with 2:1s in PPE.

As he argued, the latter sort (see also: historians like Dom, classicists like Boris Johnson and pompous English graduates like me) are very well equipped to get themselves into a position of power, what with their networks of university chums and ability to produce plausible bullshit to a deadline.