It will be interesting to see, in the light of last night’s expansion of the green list, how many people book a holiday on Pitcairn Island. More interesting, of course, will be how many people look to hot foot it to the Balearics and parts of the Caribbean. The answer to that, if Mrs Merkel has her way, is not as many as you’d think in the case of the Balearics. The government of Spain, which seems to be determined to resist Mrs Merkel’s campaign to contain the Delta variant within these shores, will hope that the answer proves to be quite a lot. Then there’s the answer of the travel industry with its continuing cry of never enough.

The government has again been criticised for coming up with a set of rules which are confusing for the present, although experience indicates that people who want to travel abroad will be determined enough, and that there are enough people with an economic stake in advising them, for them to be able to find the way through. A more confusing scenario awaits if the countries on whom we have conferred green list status do not respond by unconditionally opening their gates to UK citizens, choosing instead to apply their own rules which may not dovetail with ours. In the days before computers were universally involved in these things, there were reported instances of people whose job it was to produce pan-European train timetables having to take time off due to the stress of having to work through summertime changes which different countries applied on different dates. No doubt someone will produce an algorithm to help the modern British tourist.

It's also interesting to note that Mr Shapps has held out the prospect of our double vaccinated citizens being able to return from amber list countries without the need to self-isolate on return to the UK. I assume that this is put forward as a promise to pacify the travel industry and a carrot to encourage vaccination take up, but it will again only be as useful in its practical application as the approach taken by other countries to the terms on which travellers from the UK will be allowed to cross their borders.

In reality, we are seeing a mighty agglomeration of health policy, economics and broader politics being played out in the whole debate about travel. The UK government has built its Covid policy squarely on vaccination, and take up has been significant. Whilst governments in Europe have also embraced vaccination, resistance to it amongst many of their populations has been greater than in the UK and, due in part to delays in the EU approving vaccines for use, the roll out of vaccination programmes has been much slower. They will feel that they have to defend their populations against Covid, The UK, with its government’s noisy promotion of the speed of its vaccination programme and the rapid spread of the Delta variant here has become an obvious target for practical and political reasons. The fact that we are no longer in the EU makes the singling out of the UK even easier. In the meantime, the UK government is starting to create a scenario in which it can be seen to be rewarding those who choose to be vaccinated and to be assisting the travel industry whilst limiting the opportunity for its critics to accuse it of being irresponsible. After all, if Europe insists on us self-quarantining when we get there, that will not be our government’s fault.

We are also in the foothills of finding what level of Covid circulating in our population will be tolerated going forward. It remains notable, given our experiences both in the spring and early summer of last year and during last winter that rapidly rising levels of new infections are not being met with stricter measures. The principal driver of current policy seems to be confidence (or faith) in the ability of mass vaccination to limit the effects of those new infections. The idea of 60,000 people at Wembley in under a fortnight’s time, or 140,000 people at Silverstone within less than a month, once normal, is now genuinely striking. It feels like we are at the start of a period in which it is acknowledged that a continually mutating Covid virus will be with us for many years, that it must no longer restrict out lives or economic activity to any substantial degree and that, as part of that equation, we will rely on continuing vaccination to keep casualty rates to an accepted level, rather as we have been doing for years with flu.

In the meantime, it’s going to be interesting to see how travel bookings go over the next few days. For anyone interested in following the Bounty’s mutineers to Pitcairn, it’s only 5 square kilometres in area, there aren’t that many places to stay and it’s not that easy to get to, so I’d get to the travel agents now if I were you.

Have a good weekend.

Ian Waine leads Prettys’ Corporate Services Team and has advised on a large number of corporate recovery and corporate restructuring cases over the last 30 years. He can be contacted at 07979 498817 or iwaine@prettys.co.uk.