When news that the UK would be at the front of the queue to provide troops for a Ukraine peacekeeping force, possibly as many as 20,000, a contact from army headquarters at Andover messaged me: “Where’s this 20,000-figure come from? Who’s briefing this? We couldn’t do this in a month of Sundays!”

The next few days saw this “offer” drop to 10,000 to 12,000 troops for the as-yet-unspecified ground force – but the panic among army planners was much the same: there has been no requirement for such a deployment, the army is not set up for such numbers and has not been funded to do so.

And, worse, the army is at a nadir as regards its capability to provide robust, capable, war-fighting forces of the type that would be needed for Ukraine – equipment is either ancient, non-existent, yet-to-arrive; ammunition stocks would not last a week if push came to shove; and communications systems are old and flaky.

It might not go too far to suggest that the British army is at its lowest nadir since June 1940, after Operation Dynamo saw the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk.