It would be churlish not to celebrate revisions from the Office for National Statistics that tell us the UK is not, after all, the post-Covid invalid of the G7. Contrary to previous figures suggesting we had struggled to regain pre-pandemic levels of economic output, it turns out that our gross domestic product passed that benchmark in late 2021 and our performance has been in line with France and ahead of Germany.

Large sectoral revisions for agriculture and manufacturing tell us that statistical reporting is almost as much of a mug’s game as forecasting. But the brighter overall picture accords with the anecdotal sketch of ‘definite warming’ in consumer spending and confidence that I offered here early last month.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says the new figures prove ‘the declinist narrative about Britain… is just wrong’, while ardent Brexiteers take the opportunity to raise two cheerful fingers to our former European partners. We enter the autumn season feeling a little better about ourselves – but with no excuse for complacency.

The current furore of crumbling concrete reminds us that economic progress is too often held back by bad infrastructure, as this week’s last item also illuminates. We’re a couple of weeks away from another likely interest-rate rise. Train drivers haven’t finished striking. Capital investment in UK businesses is perilously low. New trade deals beyond the EU have yet to deliver export triumph. So we’re not as sickly as we thought, but we’re a long way from rude health.

Shop alarm

What on earth has happened to society if Tesco staff have to be equipped with body cameras in response to a one-third year-on-year increase in physical assaults – and if incidences of abuse against retail workers have doubled generally, compared with pre-pandemic figures? Other supermarket chains report similar trends, with shoplifters, often in organised gangs, grabbing upwards of a billion pounds worth of goods per year while battering anyone in their way. A new low was reached last month with a mass raid on Oxford Street stores, organised via TikTok.

How did we come to this – and to a new normality which requires ‘Do not abuse our staff’ notices at every railway station, passport desk and post-office counter? Can it really be a function of the cost-of-living crisis? Or is it a residue of bad education, class resentment, urban alienation and lack of role models that makes modern Britain more prone than other nations to feral behaviour at the customer interface?

One thing for sure is that our miscreants are not deterred by fear of retribution: policing minister Chris Philp may call for ‘zero tolerance’ and prosecution of all offences for which there is CCTV evidence, but criminals and good citizens alike know the police have neither the resources nor will to respond to every shop alarm.

He who paid the piper

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I was asked by Luis Dominguez – the filmstar-handsome Anglo-Argentine who was then The Spectator’s commercial manager – to join him for lunch with Michael Cole, the highly polished ex-BBC PR man for Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed. If the encounter had been a contest for suavity, I would certainly have come third. Our conversation is lost to memory but I suspect the real agenda was unspoken: the prospect of Harrods advertising in The Spectator if we wrote favourably about Cole’s boss. We never did – but let me at least mark the controversial tycoon’s passing, aged 94, by finding three relatively kind things to say about him.

The first is that whatever his well-chronicled faults, I would rather have found myself on a desert island with the resourceful al-Fayed than with some of the counterparts he outwitted in business, including the ruthless Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and the murderous Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. Secondly, anyone who starts out selling Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria and ends up – never, as far as we know, having spent a night in jail – with a £1.7 billion fortune for his heirs to scrap over, deserves at least grudging admiration.

And thirdly, though he was shunned by the British establishment and more so after his crazed responses to the death of his son Dodi with Diana, Princess of Wales, al-Fayed was reportedly well regarded as a Highland laird. The community around his Balnagown estate in Easter Ross thought warmly of him not least for having led a campaign to halt construction of an incinerator at nearby Invergordon and for his sponsorship of the Tain pipe band. If he and his sidekick Cole never succeeded in calling the media tunes, you might say, at least he paid the pipers.

Ferry tale

Highland sources have also pointed me to the Corran Ferry, which is Scotland’s busiest single-vessel ferry route, carrying 270,000 vehicles per year on a five-minute crossing of Loch Linnhe between Lochaber and the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Operated by the SNP-led Highland Council, it offers a vivid parable of economic damage wrought by incompetent local government.

Its single vessel, MV Corran, was towed to Glasgow for repairs last October, spent many months waiting for ‘a part from Germany’ before being put in dry dock; a smaller, older replacement, MV Maid of Glencoul, repeatedly broke down and may not return to service, leaving motorists facing a 42-mile road diversion via busy Fort William on 80 days so far this year.

As tourists turn around and head elsewhere, local businesses report falls in trade of 40 per cent or more and some say they’ll have to close. ‘The health and safety of passengers and crew is our main priority,’ says a council spokesman, who naturally sought to blame a previous administration for the initial breakdown. Oh yes, and ‘we share the disappointment and the frustration’.