The British lion is slow to wake, but when it does you can hear it roar

The Government was indeed slow in its actions to start with. There have been wobbles along the way. But we are, slowly but surely, getting there

All being well, on Friday we will be celebrating not just the 75th anniversary of VE Day, but also an easing of the lockdown as the ghastly virus death toll diminishes.

Let us trust that the Prime Minister – whose instincts are both patriotic and ebullient – will not be able to resist eliding the two. Let us hope some uplifting Churchillian rhetoric is already being rehearsed between feeds in the Downing Street flat. It can be offset perfectly by the Queen’s subtler prose in her evening broadcast.

Boris Johnson would be entirely right to merge, in the public mind, both VE Day and the reversing of the coronavirus panzers. We expect nothing less. The cheesier the better. Not only could we all do with cheering up, the containment of the virus would indeed be a famous victory.

But it goes further than that. The handy coincidence of the two is an opportunity to celebrate a renewed faith in our national character, our society and our institutions.

The two campaigns share many things in common, notably the mobilising of resources in a vast collective effort. But the most positive feature of both is that the majority of people have simply got on with life, doing their duty, observing the lockdown considerately and without too much complaint, even when the news has not been good.

From the safe distance of the

21st century, we forget that the Second World War was not one continuous, uninterrupted march to victory. Things went wrong, all the time, and the Government made plenty of mistakes. But rather than mutiny, most people had the good sense to know that life is not perfect and they just kept going.

In fact, it is this stoicism, this sense of patriotic mutuality that may have been our real competitive advantage over Nazi Germany, which ultimately relied on a contrived ideology as its motivating force. Plus we had better jokes.

A particular feature of the British system, which we should all be used to by now, is that what we now call the Establishment always stumbles somewhat complacently into a crisis and gets off to a bad start, before stepping up a gear and dealing with the situation properly.

This is what happened in 1915 when the Shell Crisis exposed a shortage of material at the front and led to David Lloyd George being made minister for munitions; and in 1940 when Neville Chamberlain was replaced as wartime prime minister by Winston Churchill.

So it has proved in the great coronavirus campaign. The Government was indeed slow in its actions to start with. There have been wobbles along the way, including the Prime Minister himself being rushed to hospital.

But most of us realised from the start that such setbacks are inevitable in a crisis. By holding it together and through the sterling efforts of the NHS, care homes, charities and businesses, we are, slowly but surely, getting there.

For that is the thing with the British lion. It is slow to wake, but when it does, you can hear it roar.