Bad news doesn’t have to be surprising

I’m still of the mind that Westminster fusses too much about these quarterly growth figures, particularly when parts of the country have been in economic decline for decades. But there’s no doubting that they have the capacity to shift the political mood, both here and around the country. There is something disheartening about the idea that the economy returned to shrinkage in the final quarter of last year (even if today’s preliminary figure of -0.2 per cent might be revised upwards, or downwards, in due course). You can expect Ed Miliband to make much of it in this afternoon’s PMQs.

The politics of the situation are not stacked entirely against George Osborne, though. His major consolation today is that everyone expected this sort of minor contraction. He’d even prepared us for it in his Autumn Statement, and countless other forecasters have warned of a ‘mild recession’ on the back of the crisis in the eurozone.