The Chamber that returns on Monday will find three matters on its ledger and no obvious order of precedence among them. The fuel reserve is the first, by calendar and by coalition arithmetic. The registry breach is the second, by the Opposition's insistence. The northern tariff, announced on Thursday in the manner that such things are now announced — through briefings, leaks, and the measured alarm of a Chamber of Commerce delegation — is the third.

Each of the three touches a different quarter of the Kingdom. The reserve touches the forecourts, which is to say every household with a motor. The breach touches the fourteen thousand whose records were exposed, and through them the principle that the state may be trusted with what it collects. The tariff touches the Cordoba assembly quarter directly and, through the supplier chain, a wider band of the industrial coast than is usually acknowledged.

It is customary at such moments for this column to urge calm, or courage, or clarity, and to close with a phrase about the season. I shall not. A Government that has laboured for a year to hold its instrument together now finds three demands upon it in a single week, and the honest observation is that the instrument was not built for three simultaneous demands. Whether it bends or holds will be known by Wednesday.

The older merchants of Almaria Vella, who have seen more weeks like this one than the present Cabinet has sat through, would counsel a particular kind of patience: not the patience of waiting, but the patience of sequencing. One matter at a time, settled before the next is taken up. It is not a fashionable discipline. It is, nonetheless, the one the Chamber will require.

The gout permits me these observations; it permits few others.