In the late 50s, the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson gave the world the term “bike-shedding”, also known as Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.

This posits that people and organisations spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on trivial but easy-to-grasp issues over large, complex, and difficult ones – in his example, the designers of a nuclear power plant endlessly debating how best to build the staff bicycle shed.

Northcote Parkinson is now some decades dead. But anyone looking to publish an updated edition of his famous Parkinson’s Laws could surely ask for no more vivid or high-profile example of this one than Rishi Sunak’s ailing government.

The absence of big-picture thinking was initially understandable; the Prime Minister was taking over from the catastrophic mayfly regime of Liz Truss, and a week-by-week focus on steadying the ship was really his only option.

Yet, the country was never going to return the Conservative Party for a fifth term in government just because it deposed Truss. After a year on the job, Sunak needed to give the voters – not to........

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