The first quarterly expansion in a year. Recession receding into the rear view mirror. A stronger performance in recent months than the Bank of England and the City had thought likely. Faster growth in early 2024 than any other member of the G7 group of leading industrial nations. When you are in as deep a political hole as the current government you seize on any good news and there was plenty for Jeremy Hunt to choose from in the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. The figures were proof that the economy was returning to “full health for the first time since the pandemic”, the chancellor said. Yet when people look back on the early months of 2024 they will probably remember the relentlessly awful weather rather than a time when the economy was cooking with gas. Boom-boom Britain it certainly isn’t. To be sure, the UK has emerged from recession but the downturn in the second half of 2023 was a much more modest affair than some of the monster downturns of the past 50 years. The hollowing out of manufacturing in the early 1980s was a genuine slump, as was the housing market crash in the...