Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey are not having a bad start. Sure, there’s trouble ahead: the Budget is going to be difficult, and Healey is going to have to find a way of making sure all the cheques his boss keeps writing can actually be cashed. But for now, the blitz of 6 a.m. announcements on the cost of living – no matter how trivial they are – appear to have worked and Burnham is experiencing a polling bounce.

Britain’s economy has a terrible habit of performing relatively well in the first half of the year before slumping to a halt

Britain’s economy has a terrible habit of performing relatively well in the first half of the year before slumping to a halt

That good news continued this morning in the form of figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show that the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year – having grown 0.6 per cent in the first three months. Crucially for us, that growth works........

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