I ring a colleague to discuss a paper we're planning to write. Have you seen the share price? she demands. I can hear her children crying in the background. It's down another 70p. I know that her mortgage is largely investment backed. On the plus side, she's got a final salary pension. I joined too late, and have a money purchase pension, whose performance has been so underwhelming, even before the credit crunch began, that I would be better off if I simply flushed thousands of pounds down the toilet every year. At current predictions I'll be able to retire onto a pittance when I'm 93. So long as I can find a second job.
I turn to the Times for some relief, with a nice cup of morning tea. Bloodbath in the City! And then I read an article that makes me bark with laughter - cold, unfeeling laughter. Alice Thomson's thesis for the day is that recession is good for us, because we'll visit our relatives more often and eat less fatty foods. She's found a paper by an 'economist' (they count as statisticians, and dine with us) which 'proves' that people are happier when living in a society rife with repossessions, unemployment and public debt. Can't quite see it myself, though I'm amused by Ms Thomson's anecdote about her post-City friends, who got so tired of the stress that they've 'downsized' to Venice. Where will Keith and I 'downsize' to when we can't afford Hackney anymore? Perhaps we'll purloin a barge, and push out onto the Regent's Canal, drifting eastwards, no doubt one boat among many, as west Londoners join the rush to downsize in a cheaper part of the capital. I can picture the denizens of Maida Vale, emerging, blinking, from the tunnel at Angel, and focusing their eyes with horror on the sign pointing towards Hackney. By day, we'll float along in silence, alone in our heavy thoughts of what might have been. By evening, we'll tie the barge to the bank, and light fires and play spoons with other downsized Londonders.
(Trouble is, I don't know where the canal goes after Victoria Park, and fear we might get washed up around Limehouse. Over-exposure to Dr Who in the 1970s leads me to fear Limehouse and its hordes of giant rats, conjured into being by the evil genius Weng Chiang. Do it to her! Not me!)
Back to reality. I'm supposed to write about politics, so here goes. You read it here first. I think that Labour will win the Glenrothes by-election. They have successfully recaptured the media narrative and as the crisis accelerates, more and more articles will appear, positing the utterly false contrast between the heroic efforts of the Prime Minister, doing "whatever is needed" to be done, and those of the evil bankers, ignoring the truth that pushing overinflated mounds of cheap, bad debt was as central to the strategy of the former as to the latter. The chief job for the Tories should not be to come up with a soundbite to solve the crisis, since I genuinely believe that no-one really knows how to get confidence back into the system. Instead, we should make the assumption that confidence in the markets will slowly return (because if it doesn't, we're all ****ed anyway), and make sure that our message about how we got into this mess is coherent, understandable, and bought by the electorate.
Failure to do so will give Brown his best chance of winning a snap election. The most chilling moment at this week's car-crash PMQs was when that Labour backbencher shouted 1979 in answer to the question When did the Age of Irresponsibility begin?
