Early this morning, the rules governing international travel were tightened once again. Not content with reintroducing more expensive PCR tests on arrival, ministers now demand that travellers take a Covid test before departing for the UK. The ostensible purpose is to curb the spread of the omicron variant. But the consequence will be fresh financial carnage for the travel sector, and disruption to thousands of people’s travel plans.

Worse, the new rules make little logical sense. Omicron is already present in the UK, and now appears to be spreading domestically. Moreover, the lesson of previous strains of the virus is that if a variant is capable of outcompeting others, there is little that any government can do to stop it indefinitely. In short, families are being asked to pay a stealth tax on travel – with a trip abroad now involving testing costs of hundreds of pounds – for little obvious reason.

This might be less galling if the Government were keeping to its side of the bargain. When omicron first emerged, ministers pledged to take a proportionate response while scientists analysed the nature of the threat the new variant posed. They subsequently promised to ramp up the vaccine booster programme, in order to increase the population’s level of protection. The NHS has been lavished with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in order to get ready for a winter long ago predicted to be difficult.

Yet by most indications, ministers are failing to follow through on their commitments fully. The campaign to deliver third doses has become mired in bureaucracy, with hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people unable to get their jabs. The lessons of the vaccine taskforce, which circumvented Civil Service strictures in order to make rapid progress, appear to have been forgotten.

It is true that the UK’s booster programme is more advanced than those of most of its European competitors. Yet they are hardly a relevant point of comparison, given that many of them have fallen back into lockdowns.

The public have been largely accepting of the reintroduction of some restrictions here, in the belief that the Government is doing everything possible to obviate the need for more draconian measures later on. But people’s patience will soon wear thin if Downing Street fails to get its act together.