We British can be a perverse bunch. In the spring, after what we now know to have been the biggest quarterly fall in economic output for 50 years, you could not keep the optimists down. “People are fed up with being fed up” and “want to move on”, said Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks and Spencer, at the end of April.

Very prescient, you might have thought. Six weeks later Martin Weale, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, was declaring the recession had ended “as far as I can tell”. The trough of the downturn had passed in March, NIESR argued, and there had been a return to modest growth in April and May.