According to John Maynard Keynes, Stanley Baldwin described the new intake of MPs after the Great War as “a lot of hard-faced men who look as though they had done very well out of the war”. Arms dealers, profiteers and conscription dodgers may benefit from military conflict. It is difficult to think of anyone who does well from a deadly pandemic – as many of those who left the trenches unscathed discovered when Spanish flu swept across Europe soon afterwards.