Monday will be a red-letter day in Britain’s grim and often inept 14-month battle with the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 12, says University College London, the country will triumphantly cross the herd immunity threshold: 73.4 per cent of Britons will have had the virus or been vaccinated.

For all the manifold failings of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government in the past year, as Britain clocked up more than 127,000 coronavirus-related deaths and almost 4.4 million confirmed cases, this is a moment the country will savour.