In the chaos and confusion which is today’s world, sometimes you are just reminded of what really matters in life. For me, it was the birth (at 6 AM) on Tuesday morning of my first grandchild, Frederick Evelyn Gray Barker. At a moment like that, somehow or another, nothing else matters.

Pandemics will come and go, the economy and spending review will sooner or later seem ancient history; little local matters like Dominic Cummings (good riddance), Priti Patel (who I support), Christmas bubbles (to which I am very much looking forward) - all of these things disappear into distant perspective by the arrival of this new little life.

My daughter, Olivia, gave me the great news by video call just a few seconds before I was due to chair the Environment Bill Committee, and I was glad to be only slightly out of order by announcing the birth when the little fellow was only 3 hours old. He can put the Hansard extract up on his nursery wall!

It was only then that the true importance of the Bill we were discussing came home to me - long after we are all gone; long after these political squabbles disappear under the waves; when little Freddie is 80 years old as we go into the next century; what we were discussing in the Environment Bill - one of the most wide reaching and radical reviews of our environmental laws and regulations in a generation - will still be of huge importance. This Bill is truly not just for now, not even for our children, but for our children’s children. So I hope that one day little Freddie will be pleased that his birth was announced during the Bill’s passage through Parliament. Olivia should be anyhow - she is a committed conservationist and environmentalist.

Two days later Rishi Sunak had to give the Nation notice of some of the worst economic figures in generations as a result of the Pandemic. We are in the midst of an unheard-of economic crisis, and its effects will be with us for a long time to come. I welcome the various steps the Chancellor has taken to try to minimise its consequences in all of our lives. But we all know that everything ultimately has to be paid for one way or another. I very much regret, for example, the reduction in spending on Overseas Aid (although I was always opposed to it being written into law); and of course, I am sorry about public sector pay (except for the NHS) being frozen. But the Chancellor has to find the money from somewhere; and no source of funding to pay for the Pandemic is going to be popular.

The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement is doing what it can to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. The fact is that there has been a sheer collapse in the economy, that unemployment will increase and people will feel the consequences in their everyday lives in so many ways. But what Rishi Sunak announced was designed to see us through the worst of it. It already has. Had we not had furlough, for example, from last March, we would be facing a far worse catastrophe than we are. So we need to plough on through it, pay the price, but try to keep the pain to its minimum. Keep our heads down. Battle through the storm and look to better times to come.