Forecasting is a mug’s game – but I was right about the economic revival

‘Perhaps I should shift my prediction to 23 July 2014,’ I wrote in April 2012. ‘That’s the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and we must all start thinking positively about it.’ I was talking about the moment when the nation would at last shake off its economic gloom, which I had previously pinned to the opening of the London Olympics. But that spring we fell back into negative GDP territory (avoiding a technical two-quarter ‘double dip’ only when the first-quarter result was revised upwards to zero) and I felt obliged to ‘elasticate my timetable’. Since the beginning of last year we have had 18 months of robust growth — but pundits less cheerful than me have continued to report a persistent absence of feelgood. Well, this week’s news nails the gloomsters at last, and right on cue: a respected forecaster called the EY Item Club (perhaps more respected than me) tells us that economic output has climbed back to pass its 2008 peak, so that ‘not only is the recession over but the recovery is technically over and we’re now moving into a period of expansion’. What’s more, the average asking price for UK houses fell by 0.8 per cent in June, indicating a cooling of the risk factor most likely to knock the expansion off course. So my Glasgow marker turns out to have been spot on — and I shall quietly forget a brief later wobble (provoked by arch–pessimist Mervyn King’s remark that his ‘estimate of how long it will take to recover is expanding all the time’) when I reached for the Rio Olympics in August 2016 and even hedged that bet with ‘Anyone for 2020?’ The real moral, as Mervyn also remarked, is that forecasting is ‘a mug’s game’.

Automotive talent

Sir Nick Scheele was the suave, multilingual Ford executive who began the revival of Jaguar in the mid-1990s that has continued so emphatically under the marque’s subsequent owner, Tata of India.