I have three friends working in very different jobs – but their experiences summarise the state of the nation

Is everything going alright where you are? Sorry, I meant – is anything going alright where you are? I ask because I would like to know that someone, somewhere actually is having a decent enough time in Britain in 2022.

When parliament rose for recess just over a month ago, I breathed a sigh of relief. Sure, there was still going to be a leadership contest to follow, but at least the grinding misery of Westminster had come to a halt, at least for a little while.

I left the bubble behind and began spending more time with my non-political friends again, and talking about things which had nothing to do with SW1. I thought, perhaps selfishly, that it would cheer me up. Oh, I was wrong.

First, I saw a friend who works in the Metropolitan Police. Morale there was at an all-time low, they said, with people quitting at such a pace that many people in management had only been in the force for a handful of years, which does not bode well for institutional memory.

More often than not, they told me over a pint, there were only two available patrol cars that could be sent to incidents. For the entire borough. “Short-staffed” doesn’t quite begin to cover it.

A couple of weeks after that, I saw another friend who works in an A&E department. How was it going there? About as well as you’d imagine. The detail that stayed with me was their warning on the cost of living crisis. Of course hospitals aren’t coping at the moment, they said, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle.

On several occasions over the summer, my friend had agonised over whether to discharge old and/or vulnerable patients. They were nominally well enough to leave hospital but were living in homes with no power, as they could no longer afford it. The “bed blocking crisis” is, in many ways, a poverty crisis. How much worse will this get over the winter? How much worse can it get?

Not long after that, I sat on a terrace with a French friend who works as a fashion photographer. So far so good, right? Well, not quite. As it turns out, she is currently thinking seriously about moving back to Paris, a decade after moving here. It isn’t that she has fallen out of love with Britain: simply that the fashion industry here has been gutted by Brexit.

Big fashion houses and emerging designers alike are now choosing to conduct their photoshoots in France, as transporting clothes, people and equipment to a non-EU country has simply become too expensive and laden with admin. It may not seem like the end of the world but it should be worrying; fashion was once one of the most lucrative industries in the country, and heaven knows we could do with both money and productivity right now.

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Those three friends may be very different from one another, but all of them sounded the same in the end. “Oh you think this isn’t going well? It’s going so much worse than you think!” is seemingly our national motto at the moment. No matter how badly things seem to be going from the outside, people on the inside will always tell you that it is only the tip of the iceberg.

The other thing these conversations had in common is that I, as the resident Westminster insider, got to tell them all that no, there was no sign that politicians quite grasped the scale of the situation. Their jobs and lives would probably continue to get worse because instead Conservative MPs preferred bickering about taxes and trans people.

Parliament returns from recess next week and my hope – vain as it may be – is that politicians had similar summers to mine. I hope that they also took time off from Westminster and talked to people from all walks of life, and finally grasped the scale of the challenge. I can’t imagine what is coming for us if they didn’t.