What’s in a name? A government minister has a good answer for Shakespeare’s question. “Names aren’t just convenient labels for people, places and things. They come with expectations,” the minister said. “Countries don’t normally have these pressures. But Great Britain? It’s quite a name to live up to.”

The words are from the opening of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back, published last year by the Labour MP Torsten Bell, now a Treasury minister. Bell’s book is about why this country is, and feels, broken. But it is also spot on about this country’s enduring naming problem. As Bell puts it: “What began as a statement about our geography has become one about our quality.”

This may seem merely semantic. It is not. Great Britain may have been originally so described because of its relative size, not from any claim of superiority. But the name has slowly acquired some of these more pretentious associations. Particularly in recent times, governments have actively tried to promote the idea of distinctive British greatness. This deliberate freighting matters. It does this country, and the effort to rebuild trust in politics, few favours.

On Monday, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander,

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