There is something deeply depressing about British politics — and it isn’t just the farcical state of the Government. Even before the current chaos — and since long before Brexit, the start of the current forever-wars — Westminster has been gripped by a crushing sense of listlessness.

That takes the form of lurching from crisis to crisis, with visionary projects such as the Growth Plan or Robert Jenrick’s planning reforms lost to yet another bout of meaningless rigmarole. Before that it simply took a different shape, as successive governments contented themselves with day-to-day management of creaking public services and shut their eyes to the deep structural problems undermining the UK.

Britain is crying out for a project, a purpose, a mission

You can see this malaise in many places. Perhaps the most obvious is infrastructure. How long have we been debating whether or not to allow one of our airports to build an extra runway? How long has it been since we managed to build a new reservoir?

The rise of separatist nationalism in Scotland and Wales can be explained in part by the fact that there’s nothing very exciting about being part of the United Kingdom at the moment. Politicians like to talk up how the Union makes us stronger and richer, but talk little about how we might apply that strength and wealth to the challenges of the age.

Britain is crying out for a project, a purpose, a mission — something which can attract and harness talent, drive growth and deliver change. Forget debating whether the basic rate of income tax should be 19p or 20p. Let the Chancellor ask instead: what could be our Moon Landing?

President John F Kennedy has been immortalised in soundbites. Many people are therefore at least passingly familiar with his famous pledge that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth”.

Yet few people realise just how ambitious a goal that really was. As NASA itself points out, when Kennedy made his pledge in 1961: “Much of the technology needed to get to the lunar surface and return didn’t exist at the time of Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech. And much was unknown.”

They did it anyway. Backed by billions of dollars, the Apollo Programme brought together some of the best and the brightest, requiring an army of scientists, engineers and technicians, recruited to work on developing technology and systems that did not exist. At its peak in 1967, the Apollo program employed over 400,000 people. 

Most were young with barely any experience. When Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon, the average age of engineers at Mission Control was 28. It even achieved a remarkable degree of diversity, given the iron grip that segregation then still held on much of the South.

The material benefits of the Moon landings were great, with the project driving the development of numerous new technologies we still use today. Just as important, at least, was that sense of common purpose, that moment when every American — and billions of others around the world — could watch a man walk on the Moon and think to themselves: we did that.

As JFK (inevitably) put it best: “The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

There’s no pretending that the Government has the resources to go and plant our flag on heavenly bodies just yet. But grands projets here on Earth operate on the same principle.

Global scrutiny can also help to drive important reforms

When the United Kingdom hosted the Olympic Games in 2012, within one year we recorded a trade and investment boost worth £9.9 billion. By 2020, the total benefit of the Games was calculated to be an astonishing £41 billion.

The construction industry boomed, with a report commissioned by HM Government revealing that construction projects for London 2012 had given the UK economy a £7.3 billion boost. East London was transformed. The Olympic site was previously an urban wasteland: contaminated by oil, tar, arsenic and lead, suffocated by invasive plants and with polluted waterways. The Games led to 20km of new roads, 13km of tunnels, 26 bridges and swathes of new parkland.

Again, there was more to the reward than can be measured in pounds and pence or bricks and mortar. Delivering the Games facilities didn’t just see us build stuff; it showed that when the political will is there, we can build stuff, and not just stadia but homes and infrastructure too. When the spectacle moved on, we managed to lock in the benefits too, delivering urban regeneration and making sure the world-class facilities are still in use today.

All that, on top of the rare pleasure of getting to see our country competing as one nation on home soil — and raking in an outstanding medal haul in the process.

The global scrutiny such ambitious programmes attract can also help to drive important reforms. If America hadn’t been acutely aware of the world watching the Soviet Union beat her into space, there would have been no Moon landing. 

That’s why we should be careful before trying to lock nations that don’t meet all our standards out of systems such as the Olympics or the World Cup.

FIFA’s decision to award the latter to Qatar, for example, has attracted much criticism. Yet in the end, it is hard to see how the biggest winners will not be Qatar’s migrant workers. With the eyes of the world on them, the Gulf monarchy has partnered with the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) in a “technical cooperation programme” and undertaken a sweeping series of reforms. 

Old visa restrictions which left immigrant labourers at the mercy of the company that sponsored their entry into the country have been swept aside. The region’s first minimum wage has been put in place, alongside up-to-date workplace safety legislation and new mechanisms for cracking down on abusive employers — an example that neighbouring nations such as Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE are now under mounting pressure to replicate.

Back here in the UK, we sometimes hear politicians wax nostalgic about the spirit of 2012, and wonder where it has gone in these dismal and divided times. Its disappearance is no mystery; we have simply done nothing to summon it since we — literally — passed the torch.