Rishi Sunak will need to wave his magic wand a bit more since the rest of the government seem so useless

You can call it Rishi’s rabbit.

Some of the reports in the run up to his House of Commons statement on the Job Retention Scheme suggested a cut was on the way, en route to its demise.

Some of them were downright nasty, such as the suggestion that British workers needed to be “weaned off” a furlough scheme they never asked to be put on.

Instead, the chancellor waved his magic wand and banished the fears cynically stoked by the government's spin doctors.

The scheme will continue to pay 80 per cent of furloughed workers’ wages, up to £2,500 until the end of July, hopefully keeping the wolves from their doors for a while longer.

Between August and October it will be tweaked to allow “greater flexibility”. We await the precise details, but they will involve employers footing some of the bill. In return, they may be able to bring their staff back part time.

Criticism was hard to find. Tough break for Labour’s Anneliese Dodds, given the currently thankless task of shadowing an all too rare star in the government’s depressingly dim firmament.

Milton Keynes Tory MP Ben Everitt declared that polling showed the government’s very Keynsian support for businesses, including the furlough scheme, “is among the best in the world”.

Does the chancellor agree, he asked, lobbing Sunak a sycophantic softball.

That he did. The chancellor wasn’t going to grouse about international comparisons as his colleagues have when the UK’s Covid-19 death toll is set against those of our European neighbours. The numbers are among the worst in the world and they look uglier by the day.

Remember when Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said keeping the number of UK deaths below 20,000 would be a “good result”?

Obscured by Sunak’s announcement was the emergence of figures from the Office for National Statistics, putting the death toll just in England and Wales at 35,044.

Add in the toll from Scotland and Northern Ireland and you get 38,355 fatalities in which Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

To give some context to that number, it approaches the population of Salisbury, which the 2011 census put at 41,000. It is also more than half the number of civilians killed through the entire course of World War Two.

The government’s proving to be a lot better with money that it is with mortality.

Sunak’s unusually sharp and sure footed performance has been very necessary in part because the rest of the government has been wearing lead-lined boots.

Now they’ve been replaced by open-toed sandals, and perhaps wrongly.

“Guided by the science,” has been a term much in vogue among ministers. But a group of independent scientists described Boris Johnson’s poorly conceived partial lifting of the lockdown as “dangerous”, while warning of the inevitability of future local epidemics.

Johnson said lockdown could be reimposed where necessary. This helps to explain the necessity of extending the furlough scheme.

Take note, too, that it is due to end in October. It’s not usually until December that ‘flu season starts in earnest, but it’s not unusual for early outbreaks to emerge in that month. Respiratory infections are normally favoured by the winter months. If that’s true of Covid-19, then the coming winter will be a long one.

Sunak had best not put away his dancing shoes or his magic wand. He might very well be called upon to find some more magic to deflect attention from the continued failings of the government in which he serves.