The Covid-19 pandemic has led to skyrocketing public debt and plummeting trust in political leaders, it emerged last week, as new polling data and the latest official statistics for the UK’s public finances underlined the historic scale of the contagion’s continuing impact.

On 21 August, figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility showed the UK’s public debt had topped £2tn for the first time ever. Net debt — excluding public banks — increased by nearly £230bn from the same period last year to £2.004tn. The figure means UK taxpayers owe a sum equal to 100.5% of GDP, an increase of 20.4 percentage points compared with July 2019.