Amid his many travails, Boris Johnson must hope that a few more days will see the “partygate” furore subside, assuming the inquiry by the senior civil servant Sue Gray provides the wriggle room to escape. But it will be but a temporary reprieve before the economic storm clouds start to gather in the spring.

Arguably, they are already here. An analysis by the Resolution Foundation think tank suggests that, for the third time since the financial crash of 2008, real wages are falling once more and began to do so way back in June.

With inflation expected to hit 6 per cent as taxes go up and energy bills double, the painful impact on household budgets is easy to foresee. Yet just a few months ago at the Tory conference in Manchester, Mr Johnson was extolling the emergence of a high-wage, post-Brexit economy. At the time, shortages of labour, especially drivers, were expanding pay packets. Bosses were told that their reliance on cheap imported workers had to end and they needed to “invest in their people”.

On the jobs front there is better news, confounding fears that the pandemic would cause mass unemployment. In fact, employee numbers are at record levels though much depends on what sort of jobs these are. If they are predominantly in low-paid sectors, declining real wages will be problematic.

Furthermore, the state itself is a drag on the economy with public sector productivity falling as vast sums were ploughed into the NHS and elsewhere to combat Covid. Mr Johnson is hopeful that a spurt of economic growth will be the harbinger of a high-wage economy in the run-up to the general election. As yet there is little sign of it.