BACK in the (apparently) endless high summer of Gordon Brown's Chancellorship, we were told that the impact of monetary policy (i.e. changes in interest rates) would take about 18 months to feed through to consumer, investor and business behaviour.
So, a rise in (say) January 2003 would lead to more cautious activity by the summer of 2004. The same would obviously be true in reverse were the Official Bank Rate to be cut.
Some of us always found this 'Pavlov's dogs' view of the economic world somewhat implausible, to say the least. And what are we supposed to believe now, given that the rate has not changed in more than four years and that even the 'quantitative easing' (QE) scheme - under which the Bank prints money and uses it to buy Government bonds, 'gilts' - has been substantially in place for at least 18 months?
Are we all supposed to feel the same as we did 18 months ago? In which case, the whole exercise is starting to look a little pointless.
Next week, the MPC holds its May meeting, with the betting seeming to be on no change to either the interest rate or the size of the QE programme. Perhaps new Governor Mark Carney will make sense of it all when he arrives in mid-summer. But it makes you wonder whether 'inflation targeting' was ever an intrinsically sound notion.
Or rather, it may make you wonder. Some of us never bought the idea in the first place.
!) Panic in the county hall (part one)
POOR David Cameron. Even his party's last-minute smear campaign against the UK Independence Party was inept and unsuccessful, as seen in UKIP's very strong performance in Thursday's local council elections. It really is not my problem, but I am astonished at how many Tories continue to believe that the Prime Minister is (a) a winner and (b) a secret Thatcherite (the two go together in their imaginings, although the party won three elections between 1951 and 1964 with moderate leaders and came close to winning a fourth).
2) Panic in the county hall (part two)
THE three established parties, suitably humbled by Nigel Farrage and his confederates, were united on one point, at least: a vote for UKIP had very little to do with the question of British membership of the European Union and was largely motivated by quite other factors. On the same reasoning, presumably, those who vote for Sinn Fein are pretty relaxed about Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom and are simply casting a 'none of the above' vote.
How the minority rulers of Rhodesia and South Africa, back in the old days, would have benefited from these sophisticated psephological insights, thanks to which we now know that the supporters of ZANU, ZIPRA, SWAPO, the ANC and the rest were actually quite happy to be bossed about by white people pretty much indefinitely.
Poland's General Jaruzelski must be kicking himself. It turns out that the Solidarity movement never had a problem with Soviet Communism, it just sort-of pretended to in order to vent other grievances.
I hope only that the Lib-Lab-Con politicians spouting this rubbish are kidding themselves. Because they certainly are not kidding anyone else.
3) 'What became of the people/ We used to be?'
YEARS ago, I picked up a 50p second-hand copy of 'Anyone for Denis?', the John Wells play based on the Dear Bill letters in Private Eye, purporting to be from Denis Thatcher to Bill Deedes, long-serving editor of The Daily Telegraph, both long since departed this life.
A few days back, I leafed through it and on page eight came across this piece of telephone dialogue from 'Denis':
'Actually HRH the D of E [Duke of Edinburgh] is by no means a bad cove. We found ourselves rather in the same boat during the Rhodesia business...Not wanted on voyage. Fears expressed that one of us might put a foot in it with Brother Coon.'
Two pages later, and 'Denis' uses what we ought to call the w-word.
The show premiered at the Whitehall Theatre in May 1981. All this would be rather less shocking had it been put on by a radical theatre group determined to smear Denis Thatcher and, by extension, his wife the Prime Minister. But the Thatchers actually went to see the play and gave every impression of thoroughly enjoying it.
Imagine a play today depicting Samantha Cameron as a racial bigot and imagine further the writer, director and producer scribbling out huge cheques for libel damages to the Cameron household. Of course, you could argue (quite correctly) that no-one has ever suggested that Mrs Cameron has ever used such derogatory language. But I am not sure the people behind 'Anyone for Denis?' had cast-iron court-proof evidence that Denis Thatcher did either.
Have we all changed so much? I really don't know. My own parents did not talk this way but, given my mother worked part-time for Mark Bonham Carter's Community Relations Commission, it is entirely possible that we were not exactly a typical Seventies household.
4) Panic in the county hall (part three)
WITHIN a year, a spurious police investigation will be launched into UKIP that will last just long enough to damage its electoral chances before we learn that no charges will be pursued. How do I know? I don't really, it's just a sort-of feeling.
Thanks for reading and enjoy the bank holiday weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan