The UK doesn’t “need more restaurants”, according to chancellor Rachel Reeves’s “entrepreneurship” adviser. She qualified the statement: “I’m not anti-hospitality but . . .” The UK treasury should be focusing on high-growth start-ups in tech and AI instead, she added. Well, it sounds pretty anti-hospitality to me.

I am not sure if you could find a better shorthand example for the soul of this Labour government: staid, technical, studied and stripped of soul, wit, warmth. This is all coming from a writer who rather likes Keir Starmer, by the way. So can you imagine how the restaurateurs of that country are speaking of him and Reeves? Chefs are famously fond of expletives.

I am reminded of this unhelpful and rhetorically graceless intervention from Reeves’s camp after hearing the sad news about Peploe’s on Dublin’s Stephen’s Green. Barry Canny, the owner and founder of this French bistro – which opened in 2003 – died in February. It is, by my measure, one of Dublin’s best restaurants. The food is good but not cheffy, while it is comfortable but not quaint and certainly never twee. It has a perfectly calibrated sense of occasion, with its white linen and professional but chatty waiters. If you have better liquidity than I, you can fast become a regular. This is a Goldilocks........

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