Young victim is just another statistic of a kind that never troubled Hancock

like Anna Marie and her children. In their spacious houses in leafy parts of London, with access to all the luxuries that made lockdowns quite tolerable for the better off, their own families were doing fine.

Hancock and his advisers did not even try to imagine how the tactics they were gleefully discussing to achieve “proper behaviour change” would affect the most vulnerable in society.

Heady on the unprecedented power they had seized to control all our lives, they were caught up in the excitement of managing the crisis and their own sense of heroism at their leading roles in the drama. They were completely removed from the day-to-day reality of lockdowns for those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum. Judging from the total absence of any discussion about collateral damage in their WhatsApp messages, they had zero interest in hearing about it either.

An intelligent child, Mark had hoped to study computer science when he left school. Instead, his education came to a juddering halt at the age of just 14. It is impossible to imagine those responsible for flawed lockdown policies being unable to secure a school place for their own children. Mark is just another statistic of a kind that never troubled them.

As The Lockdown Files show, the figures they cared a great deal about were their own approval ratings, which were inflated by “protecting” a population they were determined to terrify.

After the harrowing discovery on Christmas Eve, Mark was cremated. His mother and siblings took his ashes to Seaton Carew beach near Hartlepool, a place Mark loved. They scattered the ashes over the sand dunes. “He went off on the wind,” Anna Marie says quietly.

Let not the lessons from this tragedy also blow away on the breeze. “Frightening the pants off people” had truly dreadful consequences.