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.