“Worried about the recession?” asked the nice young woman at the top of the stairs as I came out of the Tube station the other morning. She was offering little orange leaflets to my fellow commuters and she had a lot of takers. What were the leaflets advertising? Unemployment insurance.

But back on my desk in the office lay a pile of material on almost precisely the opposite subject: “employee engagement”. This stuff had been building up over the past few weeks. It is clearly something that people are thinking about – when they are not worrying about losing their jobs.