First quarter growth was 0.7pc, while the second quarter, announced last week, yielded a still healthy 0.6pc. This annualises at what, by the standards of the post-financial crisis slough of despond, is a positively rip-roaring 2.4pc.
Much of this gain is admittedly just a rebound from last year’s mild recession; things are likely to slow over the months ahead.
Even so, annual growth of between 1.5pc and 2pc both this year and next now looks eminently possible. The international backdrop also looks encouraging. Fears of a US recession have abated and with them the damage inflicted only a few weeks back on stock markets.
The change in the economic weather is unmistakable, raising afresh the much asked question of why Rishi Sunak risked the virtual annihilation of his party by going for an early election while 20 points down in the polls.
What’s done is done, and there’s not a lot of point in speculating on what might have been.
All the same, there is much fun to be had from “what if” history, and it remains hard to explain why Sunak didn’t wait for the much better economic news now beginning to come through. He’s yet to properly explain it himself.
Possibly, he concluded that the brand was already so badly damaged that no amount of economic good news could restore its fortunes. Or that his party was so hopelessly at war with itself that it had lost the will to govern.
Maybe he was right, but you don’t generally surrender before you need to. I have used this fable before by way of analogy, but it bears some repeating.
The great polymath, Mulla Nasruddin, is caught in the act and sentenced to death. Pleading forgiveness from the king, he promises that given a year, he can teach the king’s horse to sing.
The idea amuses the king, and he agrees to the bargain. “You know full well that you cannot teach that horse to sing,” says Nasruddin’s cellmate. To which he replies: “Ah but a year is a long time, and anything can happen in a year.
“The horse might die, the king might die. I might die. And who knows, the horse might sing.”
In Sunak’s case, it wasn’t just that the economy was already on an improving trend. If he had waited, it is more than likely that Nigel Farage would have been otherwise engaged helping his “friend” Donald Trump navigate the US presidential election, and would therefore have been unavailable to sprinkle his stardust on Reform, the upstart party that did the Tories so much damage. I imagine that the recent riots would also have significantly harmed Reform, bringing disaffected Tory votes back to the fold.
In any case, it is all so much water under the bridge now.
The perhaps more important observation to be drawn from the latest GDP data is that the UK has begun to significantly outperform the other major economies of Europe. This may be partially explained by slightly higher rates of net migration.