The Spectator

Family fortunes Louise Mensch became the latest MP to resign in order to spend more time with her family. The phrase has become something of a euphemism over the years to refer to somebody who has made a suspicious exit, not least because the original politician to resign for that stated reason — Norman Fowler from his job as employment secretary in January 1990 — did so a few months after the sudden departure of Nigel Lawson as chancellor of the exchequer. — That event signified a deep rift between Mrs Thatcher and her ministers, and presaged her downfall a year later. Fowler has since insisted that he really did want to spend more time with his family, which at the time consisted of a wife, Fiona,16-year-old stepson Oliver and daughters Kate, 8, and Isobel, 5.

An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 ­million for the opening and closing ceremonies alone — has been laid aside in a rush of public enthusiasm. The biggest source of discontent this week has been the rows of empty seats reserved for the IOC’s politburo and their associates. After any big party, of course, there is the risk of a big hangover. The Olympics will be no exception.

The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western economies were not only growing again; they had surpassed the level at which they had peaked in the late 1920s. Unemployment was falling and the banking system had regained some solidity. It is no longer accurate, therefore, to describe the economic crisis as the ‘worst since the 1930s’. On some measures it is worse than that. The banks are still far from safe and there is no end yet in sight to the second trough of Britain’s double-dip recession.

Scambusters is the name of a government initiative to prevent householders falling victim to rogue traders who use high-pressure sales techniques to flog lousy and vastly overpriced goods and services. It would be more convincing if the government did not so frequently allow itself to be ripped off. At his appearance before the home affairs select committee this week, G4S chief executive Nick Buckles had the air of a cowboy plumber standing amid a bathroom full of leaking pipes, and demanding, in spite of the havoc he has caused, that his bill be paid in full. To astonished MPs he agreed that the reputation of his company was in ‘tatters’, and doubted whether it could provide even its lowered target of 7,000 security guards for the opening day of the Olympics.