Prince Harry is surfing an investment wave

Does the economist David Blanchflower — who I described as the Bank of England’s ‘resident wacko’ during his 2006-09 tenure on the Monetary Policy Committee and who later served as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — have a former pupil on the editorial team of the Today programme? I can’t think why else he should have been afforded a soft six-minute interview with Mishal Husain (addressing him by his nickname ‘Danny’) in Monday’s prime slot between Thought for the Day and the eight o’clock news.

British-born, US-based Blanchflower is best remembered for declaring in 2009 that if the then shadow chancellor Osborne’s proposed spending cuts were ever enacted, ‘five million unemployed or more is not inconceivable’. Off-piste predictions were his stock in trade in those days; this week he popped up to plug a theory that — while he sees inflation as a temporary distraction — the US economy could be heading for recession, into which the UK will inevitably follow.