This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Spring is in the air for the UK economy. That is the message the Government wants to get over and, in the past few days, there has been quite a bit of evidence supporting that optimistic view.

We have had first quarter GDP figures showing growth of 0.6 per cent, equivalent to 2.4 per cent annual rate. Real incomes are growing again, up 2 per cent in January to March. The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has told Sky News that the path of interest rates is downwards. The stock market has been booming, with the FTSE100 index of large London-quoted companies up more than 9 per cent this year and hitting a new all-time high in trading on Wednesday morning.

And while we won’t get the next set of inflation figures until 22 May, the markets expect the consumer price index to be close to, or maybe even below, the 2 per cent target. If it is, there is a decent chance of that first cut in interest rates coming through at the next monetary policy committee meeting in June.

It certainly seems to be a remarkable shift from the gloomy prospect for the economy earlier in the year. The latest GDP estimates mean that the UK, instead of staging the second-slowest recovery among the G7 countries since the pandemic struck, suggest it was actually the third-fastest, with only the US and Canada ahead of it.

But whenever there is a change of mood like this you have to ask whether it is real. After all, the statistics are almost always revised and, in any case, if people don’t feel any difference, maybe not much has changed.

Start with those GDP numbers. Yes, they signal the end of recession, but it is quite possible that the recession itself will be revised away when more data comes in. So there clearly was decent growth in the first quarter, but it is easy to have a great leap forward if you start from far back enough. Maybe we were not so far back at the end of December, and so........

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