That rush of air you heard around 7am was the sound of Jeremy Hunt breathing a sigh of relief, as the Office for National Statistics announced that the UK had narrowly avoided recession in 2022. The technical definition of a country in recession is one in which GDP falls for two consecutive quarters, and having flatlined – with GDP growth of 0.0 per cent – in the last quarter of the year, the UK missed this category by a hair’s breadth.
This allowed the Chancellor to say that “our economy is more resilient than many feared”, and that while “we are not out of the woods yet”, the Conservative Party (which certainly didn’t lead us into those woods) had found the map out of the woods and was pretty sure, this time, that it was holding it the right way up.
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