There was a lively debate on the Moral Maze, BBC Radio 4, on Saturday night. The motion was: “Should the Government measure our national happiness?” Apparently this is what the Coalition is planning to do. As today, January 24, is now unofficially designated “the most miserable day of the year” it might seem a subject worth considering.

Of course, none of the programme’s witnesses was able to provide a satisfactory definition of “happiness” and the panel was sceptical, if not downright dismissive, of the whole idea. Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, one of the witnesses, actually incorporates the teaching of “happiness”, or “well-being” as he prefers to call it, into his school curriculum and struggled to put up a case for it by saying that A-level results had shot up by over 30 per cent since these lessons had started.