This week, tennis player Emma Raducanu won the US open, showing that unlike Prince Andrew, she’s not scared of an American Court. Actually talking of which, Prince Andrew has a shooting weekend scheduled 2 days before the first court hearing in the US, be careful Andy, accidents will happen after all.

However, the larger story out of the US this week was an order from the White House that all federal employees have to be vaccinated, they have around 2 months in which to do so but this raises a couple very important questions, the largest of which is what happens to the country if people decline the offer and the federal government ends up having to get rid of hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of workers. I say workers although many of them don't do a lot work, except actually when you look at the fine print it turns out that the rules don’t apply to members of congress or their staff. But that’s to be expected I suppose, even normal rules: Everything that goes up must come down? Take a look at the national debt.

But to the point raised, what happens if out of the 2m or so members of the US armed forces, the military is forced to discharge half a million people. If you think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a confused shambles, it will be interesting to see what happens when the army’s forced to remove troops from Germany and the border with North Korea. Honestly, I really think this is a far bigger story than anyone has realised. Air traffic controllers are federal employees, it wouldn’t take too many people walking away to shut down air travel, including cargo aircraft. Or maybe I’m wrong and all of these people will choose to change their mind and all the stories about federal workers thinking of changing jobs will all disappear. They might all disappear, just like the clips from last year where both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were on film saying they wouldn’t take a vaccine because Donald Trump was recommending it. That’s the problem when you take an issue and make it part of a culture war. The same state of affairs is true in France were Emanuel Macron made the Astra-Zeneca vaccine a political discussion, thus splitting the country down the middle and re-framing the vaccine debate as being as much about covid as it is on unemployment and immigration. Talking about France by the way, does anyone else think that Chewbacca in Star Wars is French? He seems to understand English perfectly well but he just refuses to speak it. Anyway, to the UK, Sajid Javid this weekend said that the government opposes a vaccine passport system, I suspect the government quite astutely knows that the rollout and participation in such a system would be seen by a good section of the public as a tacit acceptance of other tory policies and that Boris would like to keep tribalism over Brexit or social care as far away from the public health discussion as possible. Or maybe he’s waiting to roll it out on the sly when the US is forced to remove all its remaining soldiers from Eastern Europe.