Any other business: Double dip or not, history says morale may take two more years to recover

This week marks the 20th ­anniversary of John Major’s election victory and my debut in The Spectator. The two events were connected: going to press on the eve of a close poll, the editor needed one more non-political feature — and pulled my essay on the follies of the 1980s City out of the pile of unsolicited submissions. In it I observed that the ‘great blaze of swaggering hubris’ which characterised bankers’ boom-time behaviour had given way to grimmer times. The archetypal financier was no longer swanning round the world in first-class luxury but, ‘if he still had a job at all, stuck at Frankfurt… with an economy ticket, a ham roll and a bout of flu’. Not for long, however: ‘Markets and bank proprietors have short memories, the gravy train may roll again.’

I certainly got that right, but I’m ready to eat a more recent prediction — that the opening of the Olympics on 27 July will be the moment the nation finally shakes off its economic gloom. Now the OECD says we’ve double-dipped — though the British Chambers of Commerce disagree — I fear I must elasticate my timetable. Again, our archive offers a guide. In April 1992, the economy had fallen back into negative territory after one narrowly positive quarter preceded by 18 months of recession. Growth started motoring again in September, when the pound fell out of the European exchange rate mechanism; but morale did not perk up for many months after that. Indeed, it was in August 1994 (when Tony Blair had taken a 33-point honeymoon lead over Major in opinion polls) that I felt moved to write a piece headlined ‘You’ve really never had it so good’, cataloguing upbeat indications and urging the nation to cheer up. Perhaps I should shift my prediction to 23 July 2014; that’s the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and we must all start thinking positively about it.