Another week, another blog network wraps itself up. This time it’s the business network, Know More Media, which was particularly hard hit by Google’s ranking penalties.

Like BlogNation, a UK-based outfit, they simply ran out of money. I can think of many others that suffered the same fate, but will spare you the litany.

Even the few networks that professionalized themselves by raising VC funding and bringing in experienced managers, are finding the going tough right now. Earlier predictions of another dotcom bust are not off the table yet.

I’ve written many pieces here over the past three years on the choices faced by network owners and the chances of success. Most warned of this present crisis. As a result, Syntagma was ahead of the pack in diversifying into specialist information products on subscription terms. We have not yet felt the full force of the U.S. recession-in-progress.

The coming steep downturn in the UK will have minimum effect on us, except if the pound sterling falls relative to the dollar, in which case we will see our income rise on a windfall.

In America, the startup industry is losing momentum fast, although there’s no shortage of brave souls willing to chance more than their arms.

So, what’s to be done if you have invested heavily in an internet business, whether content or blogging-based or not?

The answer is to spot the second bounce of the ball.

As the economies eventually begin to turn around and a slow recovery takes place, most people will be looking out for “little green shoots” to signify a return to economic growth. In the early 1990s those shoots were a long time coming, and when they did, they grew slowly like hardwood trees, not the swift pines we were hoping for. I suspect the little shoots will keep us waiting even longer this time.

Green shoots may be interesting, but watching for the second bounce of the ball is usually more profitable. If the first bounce online for many of us was mass publishing technologies, what could the second be?

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Forget social media. Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age highlights the price we pay — including actual brain damage — for standard multi-tasking and trying to keep abreast of the information space.

As in my own book on the subject, Mediate Yourself, this is now becoming a common theme whose time is about to come. Finding ways not just of sifting and processing information but relating it to people’s essential requirements is a major path forward. Limiting individuals’ needs to interact with screens is probably more relevant still.

Simplifying the lives of knowledge workers is the big leap forward that will take us to the next level.

So far technology and software have complicated human life immeasurably. The constant pressure to upgrade and learn new tricks is mind-mashingly painful for most people — hence the brain damage.

The truth is, there may be no single second bounce this time, but a series of mini-bounces, with no one golden goose presenting itself for carving.

At Syntagma, we have our eyes on a variety of possibilities. To use a rugby term, all it needs is for someone to pick up a ball and run with it. As I write, there are not many runners out there.

Oh well, I’ll just have to do it myself, I suppose.

As a Silly Season exercise, let us imagine what might have been had the Labour Party chosen Gordon Brown instead of Tony Blair as its leader in 1994?

Let’s assume that he had won the election in 1997 with a 40-seat majority — Gordon isn’t the stuff of which landslides are made.

Tony Blair would probably have been given the Foreign Office, allowing him plenty of opportunities to scour the world for freebie holiday venues — and keeping him out of his master’s way.

Would Gordon still be PM in 2008?

If he had put up a straight bat — Geoffrey Boycott style — he would almost certainly have won the 2001 election. The Conservatives were simply not ready for office. Even a man with all the charisma of a sedated walrus could have won that, although probably with a reduced majority — let’s say, 25.

In those days Brown didn’t have the reputation of the Man in the Iron Mask, locked away in the Treasury for 10 years in a long sulk matched only by Edward Heath’s — a fellow traveller with similar psychological characteristics.

And we wouldn’t remember him going from Batman to bit-part player in 12 months either. He would have had the benefit of the doubt, not to mention the unusually benign economic conditions of the past decade.

Dour Gordon might just have hung on in there for two Parliaments on gravitas and “the economy stupid”. But what about the third general election, in 2005?

I don’t believe Brown would have risked the Iraq war, as Blair did just to stay onside with the American President. His ratings wouldn’t have flatlined overnight in the way his predecessor’s did. Somehow Gordon would have kept his head doggedly above water and achieved a reasonable result against Michael Howard in “the dullest general election in British Parliamentary history”. Let’s give him a majority of 6.

So here we are, back almost in the present day with Gordon Brown still in power and Blair long since gone to the lures of Political Big Brother and other c-list game shows.

David Cameron now comes on the scene and challenges the old walrus. “I am the heir to Brown,” he declares while arriving at the House of Commons in a sledge drawn by huskies. “Vote Blue, ditch Brown” he yells across the dispatch box.

It’s now 2008, with the economy falling apart from the American sub-prime crisis and a hapless Geoffrey Robinson, Chancellor for eight years, getting all the blame for Britain “not fixing the roof when the sun was shining.” He resigns and is quickly replaced by Brown’s closest ally, Alistair Darling.

The Prime Minister is a mere five points behind in the opinion polls with everything to play for. True to form he hangs on until early 2009 — just before the full force of the recession bites.

Gordon will never be a national treasure. He may be a Treasury type, but never a treasure. Nevertheless, the public admires his quiet persistence over a decade in its service and goes to the polls in two minds about him and the young Etonian pretender, David Cameron.

It’s a hung Parliament. Brown invites Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democrat leader into a Lib-Lab pact and he accepts, eager for office.

Cameron prepares for more years in opposition, secretly believing he will never win against the formidable Brown.

“How I wish Blair had won the Labour leadership back in 1994,” he confides to wife, Samantha. “He would never have won a single election. They would have seen through him right from the start.”

Confusion in the ranks seems to be par for the bourse where Gordon Brown is concerned — how many column inches can we get out of this man?

Teeming circus troupes of performers are now consulting their I Chings and pronouncing judgement on the rotting corpse of Brown’s political career.

As I write, The Times (London) is reporting that David Miliband (read, goggle-eyed Gollum) and Harriet Harman (read, Mad Hattie Harperson) are plotting the ultimate coup against the once greatly-to-be-desired leader. But the views of many other noted commentators are all over the place like Rorschach tests from a football crowd.

Let’s take the tour.

Matthew Parris in The Times (London) declares any revolt against Brown is all chirruping and twittering and will amount to nothing at the end of days. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, looks deeply into a pound of cheddar cheese in his fridge and, like a Roman soothsayer reading chickens’ entrails, pronounces Brown safe from the Brutus faction.

While Peter McKay in the Daily Mail entreats Brown to “bow out gracefully”, quoting Robert Browning’s Lost Leader — Never glad confident morning again. A return to Victorian values at last.

However, Janet Daley, in the Telegraph, warns that a newly-anointed four horsemen of the apocalypse could arise from Labour’s ashes to destroy David Cameron’s dreams of electoral glory. Counter-intuitive, that one.

Uber-loyalist, Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, admitted almost tearfully on Newsnight last evening that it’s all over, and poor, dear Gordon, in whom she had invested her very soul, was a total duffer and had to go. While a fellow acolyte on the same programme almost, but not quite, tore off his red rosette in despair.

The feeding fanaticism continued over at the Observer, where that elegant rune-reader Andrew Rawnsley, damned Brown as a dead man walking.

Peter Oborne in Saturday’s Mail broke the news that David Cameron’s people are talking to Alex Salmond’s people about how an SNP administration in Scotland could work together with a Tory set-up in Whitehall. Apparently, as two middle-class, patriotic parties, they could get along just fine, forming an alliance to wipe the Labour Party off the map of Britain — or Anglo-Celtic Albion, perhaps — he’s not called Cameron for nothing.

Simon Jenkins weighed in on Sunday, applauding the idea of an Anglo-Saxon England, devolved from Scotland. Ancient counties and churches could presumably be revived without the nasty socialist influences from north of the Border. England would be richer and might even pull out of the European Union.

The great Lockean libertarian William Rees-Mogg in Monday’s Times thought Miliband a British Obama, but even so, Labour should choose “Hillary” in the person of Hattie Harhaddock. Are we beginning to go ever so slightly mad over this little local difficulty?

There’s so much more of this around, and in the most sober of British circles too. Richard Littlejohn, for example, positively reins in his excitable steed, saying, “Some people are speculating that New Labour now faces annihilation. So what? Works for me.”

Either it’s the annual Silly Season, or something really is afoot here. I still think Gordon should call an immediate general election, if only to allow Cameron and Salmond to form their cross-border coalition and bring peace to this benighted Isle. The Union is dead, Long live the Union.

One thing’s for sure. Regency England is alive and well — and kicking like a mule.

He came, he lingered awhile, then he left. I know he was here because I had a glimpse of him in Horseguards Parade with Gordon Brown, and saying a few words outside Number 10.

Oh, and he had a photo-op with David Cameron — the next Prime Minister — beside Big Ben (right), when Cameron presented him with a CD by The Smiths, apparently called “The Queen is Dead” — a very strange choice for a Tory leader.

But it was that kind of visit. Barack Obama was at pains not to look like a President-in-waiting to the folks back home, while presenting himself as just that to the foreign dignitaries he met. A weird psychological balancing act by any standards.

So how did he do?

About as well as he could have done in the circumstances. A black man as a potential President is a new experience for everyone. We all assessed him in our own way. I was struck by how unlike other black American politicians he is. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson both had that Alabama feel about them. A bit downtrodden, slightly angry, and from the other side of the tracks.

Obama is not like that at all. He comes across as an urbane, Harvard-educated, East-Coast liberal. There’s an elegance and poise about him that suggests he’s comfortable in his own skin, and not a trace of resentment against anyone. He reminded me of a typical English gentleman — without the accent.

I’m not too taken with his platform speaking style, though. It begins to grate a little after a while. His delivery is in short bursts of well-prepared sound-bites with a falling cadence at the end of many sentences and phrases. The predictability of this creates a mannerism which detracts from his meaning.

I much preferred Hillary Clinton’s style, particularly in the final speech of her campaign which, if you removed the over-done feminism and the achingly-Left liberalism, was of true Presidential calibre.

The final impression I had was that only Obama’s politics stand in his way now. If his voting record in the Senate is anything to go by, he may be just beyond the pale of electability to most Americans.

It’s certainly all to play for. McCain is a solid, if unexciting, candidate. It will take a real touch of class from Obama to beat him.

Reading through today’s Sunday papers feels like surveying the aftermath of the battle of the Somme. Around 20,000 British soldiers lost their lives there on the first day alone. A further 30,000 were wounded. Gordon Brown must surely count himself one of the walking wounded after recent events and may even be wondering if he hasn’t died and gone to hell.

He should take heart from those who went before. To historians, desperate situations are more interesting than great victories. They throw up extraordinary characters and tales of heroism against the odds.

Leaders are rarely magnanimous in victory — as Churchill urged them to be. Mostly they lord it up and preen in their assumed glory. A back against a wall reveals more of the moral fibre of anyone than easy accomplishment. Churchill himself is the perfect example.

So what can Brown do now to escape the deep, dangerous hole he finds himself occupying?

He can soldier on, of course, crying out his familiar very-sub-Shakespearean mantras: “Carry on with the job. Long-term decisions. Global solutions. International action … etcetera. He should face up to the fact that oratory and original thought are not his for the taking in this dark night of the soul.

Just hanging on in there, though, is a perilous position for him. It would surrender the initiative to his enemies. In effect he would be placing his fate in the hands of every opponent who has a grudge against him — and there are many.

On the other hand, he could simply resign. Walk away from his troubles as if they never existed. Retire to the life he loves, of books, academia and history.

Ah, history! Wouldn’t it remind him of how little he achieved as Prime Minister, how dismally he is placed in the league table of British leaders? At least Anthony Eden won a general election before he impaled himself on the bayonet of Suez. Harold Wilson won three elections in his long march to the bankruptcy of Britain. Clement Attlee won a landslide victory and didn’t remain long enough to see out the economic disaster that resulted from his Marxist nationalisation spree.

No, Gordon would be rated one of the worst Prime Ministers of all, mainly because he brings his many failures as Chancellor with him. His honeymoon to hopeless clown within 12 months is hard to match in recent history.

That doesn’t leave many options for our unhappy leader, does it? Well, yes, it leaves one. Big, brave and gloriously counter-intuitive, Gordon could confound the lot of us by emulating Marshall Foch.

When French HQ radioed Foch and asked for his position at a crucial battle in World War I, he replied, “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack.” And attack he did, taking the enemy completely by surprise.

If I were Gordon I would announce an immediate general election. It should be in the minimum timeframe possible — three weeks on Thursday — the Labour Party has no money left to fight an election. Who cares? Who needs useless posters stuck up everywhere? As Prime Minister he would command all the screen time he wanted. Minor expenses could be funded from the few usual suspects remaining, including a couple of friendly unions. The fact that it is August could work for him if he plays his hand astutely.

He would instantly backfoot both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who would not be prepared for an election. He would begin to win plaudits from the papers and political commentators for his “courage” — and not before time. The electorate would grudgingly admire his pluck — a favourite quality for the British. Many would see him anew, and admiration would not be far away. As an underdog, the Brits would line up behind him again in increasing numbers. He would be the talk of the town. Even David Cameron would have difficulty in matching the fighting, no-more-boring Mr Brown.

But would he win? I doubt it. The best he could do would be to claw back some support to deny the Tories the landslide they now see beckoning.

If he could close the gap to a 30, 40, 50 seat majority for the Conservatives, he would be a hero in Left-liberal circles and a formidable Leader of the Opposition. The newly energized Labour ministerial team might clean up against a tentative and inexperienced Treasury bench. David Cameron would be hard-pressed to gain traction for his new administration of which so much is expected.

Of course, Brown could crash out badly and be forced to resign anyway. But at least he would have fought his corner with attempted distinction and gone down in a fanfare of glory. The Charge of the Brown Brigade against impossible odds. The Brits would love it.

That may be the best he can hope for.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Leader of the Labour Party, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had surprisingly few titles in his long 11 years in government. Some Minsters have managed to accrue almost one a year to embellish their CVs and Who’s Who entries.

Maybe he deserves another to plump out his list, even if it is an honorary gong going forward.

The title I have in mind has been available to him ever since the local elections in May and the loss of London to David Cameron’s Tories. It should certainly have been collected after the disastrous debacle in Labour’s safe seat of Crewe and Nantwich. Now, following yesterday’s cataclysmic implosion in the East End of Glasgow — the very soul of Labour’s heartland — we’re going to pin it on his chest whether he likes it or not.

Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition Designate.

Not that he will linger in his new job when his party is wiped out Canadian-meltdown style in the next General Election. You can be sure he will step down from politics the moment he concedes defeat. A son of the manse who built a reputation for pulling rabbits out of hats will find the absence of hats very hard to bear. Latterly, even the rabbits have deserted him.

For Gordon was the man who, as Chancellor, forged a glittering Cityscape of infrastructure to celebrate his achievements. The Golden Rule that borrowing should be for “investment” only, not for consumption. As a man without a moment’s experience of commerce in his entire life, his idea of investment was more, and yet more, state clutter.

His Borrowing Rule and his Financial Regulator were equally flawed. He’s had to send in his chief ghillie to slice them up for breakfast after they all dropped dead at the same time. Gordon’s smoke and mirrors have disappeared in a big puff of smoke.

Like many, I sometimes get a twinge of conscience in seeming so beastly to a one-eyed man who has pursued his partial vision with commendable vigour for so long. Then I recall that his 1970s-style economics was aimed at creating a client state that would, in theory, always vote Labour. The same was true for mass immigration.

The list of betrayals goes on. Signing away the country to a foreign power (as the EU will be after the Lisbon Treaty) against the wishes of a large majority of the British, and ratting on the promise of a referendum. Selling seats in the upper chamber of Parliament, and other honours, for party funding — he denied knowledge of this outrage but no-one believes him …

Eventually you get weary of compiling inventories of Brown’s failings, treacheries, errors of judgement and betrayals of trust. Like many obsessives, he bores by excess.

The electorate has already spoken. Will he go of his own volition? Brown’s tragedy is that he has no hinterland, nowhere else to go. To him, politics and life are one. Even the books he occasionally writes are intended to burnish his career prospects. Silly little tomes about courage, from a man who conspicuously has little of it. He has been labelled “yellow” by his opponents.

But he won’t go unless pushed and the Labour Party doesn’t cut down its leaders. It’s the long stalemate before checkmate.

Rudyard Kipling had a prescient little verse for our Leader of the Opposition Designate:

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

Cartoon by Peter Brookes

“It’s with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging.”
Jason McCabe Calacanis

Hold the front page? Well, yes, maybe — at least of the Silicon Alley Reporter, the U.S. trade magazine he founded.

Jason Calacanis is more widely known as the man who sold a network of blogs for around $30m to AOL a few years back. He is one of Web 2.0’s highest flyers in the sense that he turned big thoughts into big bucks. He now runs his own hand-rolled search engine, Mahalo.

His resignation “post” (as purists still call them) is worthy of Victorian melodrama, leading to charges of link-baiting — a common way of driving traffic to blogs. Naturally, he denies this, claiming never to have soiled his hands with such practices. Perish the thought.

He will, he says, replace his blogging activities with a private email list comprising roughly 1000 subscribers, all drawn from a group he calls “insiders”. These are intelligent, tech and business types of the kind most often found in Silicon Valley, California. So if you’re an Albanian circus performer with limited English, don’t bother to apply.

Why this move, and why now? Obvious answers include:

1. blogging has had its day.
2. attention spans are getting shorter, hence Twitter.
3. good bloggers often work as hard as journalists for little pay.
4. blogging has failed to build a reputation for quality.
5. spam comments have brought the system to its knees.
6. blog comments have let in demons from the outer darkness.

And there are many more reasons than those.

For good writers with something original to say, blogging has become a downward-leveller, rather than an enabler, as originally intended by weblog pioneers like Dave Winer. If you are a serious blogger, most readers will assume your opinions are prejudices, and ranting your principal method of communication. Otherwise, why don’t you write for The Guardian or Scientific American?

Commenters will lead you to believe the worst of the human race, which is why the traffic lights at the top of this site read “Comments OFF, Email ON.” Signs like this are becoming more prevalent around the “blogosphere” as people start to audit their return on capital from blogging.

The email list system is more like a private forum in which selected subscribers discuss topics in a “thread,” in this case the leader of the group’s weekly email. As a method of publishing to a coterie of like-minded individuals who are able to develop the arguments and refine them in a civilized fashion, the list has much to commend it. It’s also very cheap — no paper, printing and postage costs, or time-overhead batting away the daft, stupid, nasty and positively evil intruders.

For an author writing a nonfiction book with closely-argued chapters, it would be an excellent way of fact-checking the material and the logic of its presentation bit by bit, without having to submit it to academic specialists for verification before publishing.

In Jason Calacanis’s case, I would suspect he just wants to express himself in writing without all the hassle from trolls and oddballs.

In the end, the wisdom of crowds is no such thing because the most reckless, outspoken elements inevitably rise to leadership positions, drowning out more measured voices.

Meritocracy — the spirit of excellence, with decisions taken at points of maximum competence — always needs nurturing in cell-like establishments.

Let’s face it, the world is too big for any one individual to make much of an impact without vast wealth or political power. The blogosphere has become so enormous, comprised of multitudes of tiny, discrete pieces that it takes on the laws of quantum physics rather than the world of direct contact with our peers that humans crave.

There’s no worse tragedy than to have communicated widely for years only to discover that the throng out there still doesn’t know what you’ve been talking about.

Yesterday I heard the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown — speaking from the G8 conference in Japan — make one of the weirdest statements I’ve ever heard from a head of government.

He said, and I paraphrase from memory: “Each family in Britain throws away £8 ($16) worth of food every week. We have to tackle this on a global basis.”

Allowing for possible editing of the clip and the deficiencies of my memory box, it is incomprehensible until you remember that our man Gordon thinks everything has to be dealt with globally. Even, it seems, what to do with curling up sandwiches.

Apart from “long-term solutions”, global and globally are his favourite words, and never very far from his lips.

So let’s take the statement at its face value. Each family … £8 of food. Maybe that has something to do with the sell-by dates added by supermarkets and food manufacturers. Is that a problem for the Galactic Council?

The BBC had an unintentionally hilarious live broadcast from one British city’s rubbish tip. The reporter excitedly told us that behind him was all the food that the good burghers of said city had thrown away that day. The pile was about the size of my compost heap.

What startles me about Brown’s words is firstly his small-minded, nitpicking approach to the current inflation in food prices, which then balloons out to “global solutions”.

My interpretation? He knows he can’t solve the myriad of minor problems at home — he’s had ten years to do it — so he parades himself as a “global player,” an activist on the world stage.

But then that was always the way with the Blair-Brown joint premiership. Their main interests and efforts have always been for Africa or Europe, or sorting out the Middle East. Internationalism precedes nation, global takes precedence over the problems of the homeland.

It’s a classic case of inflatus, brought on by incompetence and lack of empathy with their own country. They have never “batted for Britain”.

The G8 has become a worthless jamboree for performing heads, one eye on the domestic audience, another on their own perceived global importance. It’s yet another failed attempt to develop a “World Government”.

Leaders like Brown should muse on the fact that if national governance is so difficult, how much less worthwhile it is to create regional and global institutions which take on the same tasks — like complaining about folk chucking away a few ancient pizzas.

Is the G8 past its sell-by-date? Gordon Brown certainly is.

Remember the old song that begins: “Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, So let’s sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again.”?

You don’t need to be a grumpy old puritan to be thankful that a decade of overindulgence, bubble following bubble, and preening egos fed by Cheshire cat politicians whose every error is concealed by good economic tidings, is finally and emphatically over. But can we really squeeze some happy juice from the remaining husks of our collapsing economies and even Western civilization itself?

You bet we can. We’ll start small — just to get you in the mood.

Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, a brewing and hotels business, is quoted thus in today’s UK Telegraph : “… throughout East Anglia we are seeing fewer cars on the roads … That’s just one example. There are fewer people going to pubs and they are also spending on different things.”

Isn’t that what almost everyone has been working towards for years — fewer cars on the roads? And is he hinting at a curtailment of binge drinking, which has become a serious social problem in Britain? Coming from a brewer, that must carry weight.

In England, we were recently informed that unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe, thanks to the EU, and the same from the rest of the world, thanks to the Newish Labour government, would double our population in 30-40 years. Considering our population density is already ten times that of the United States, four times France’s and three times Germany’s, that would be a disaster and leave the country unrecognizable even to its own.

Now the word on the street is that half the East Europeans have left as employment dries up and the exchange rate becomes less favourable for them to send money home. The same is beginning to happen with all immigration as the government tightens up on benefits and entry restrictions, mainly, one surmises, to save money.

Better still, the twin projects of a government lacking coherence and competence, while simultaneously pursuing programmes of social engineering unparalleled outside the old communist world, are now exposed as lethal and highly unrewarding. Gordon Brown, a shambling, frightened figure these days, embodies the imminent death of this unhealthy movement. And it took the collapse of the economy to do it. We may regard that as a small price to pay.

I’m guessing that similar scenarios can be found in most other Western countries. In America, for example, where a liberal-left Presidential candidate has a real chance of victory, will a hard-pressed people vote for an untried, although worthy, man whose sketchy manifesto to date closely resembles Blair’s and Brown’s of a decade ago? Won’t they prefer the experience of an older man offering more of a hair shirt approach to the nation’s finances?

The greatest benefit of recessions is that they shake out the incompetent and the wasteful. Companies that should never have received the support of banks or private equity firms fall apart under the weight of highly-leveraged debt. It causes much hardship, of course, but it brings us collectively back to earth and to honest and careful accounting.

Foolhardy projects, like the euro-currency zone and the EU constitution, are revealed for what they are: the expensive fantasies of puffed-up politicians. They may just survive, unfortunately, but they will not be taken seriously in future, and the likelihood is that they won’t exist in ten years.

And what of all those little luxuries we’ve got used to during the past decade of higher disposable incomes? I always did prefer a measure of ebony tea in a cracked mug to a latte in a supercool coffee shop.

We may have had access to all manner of entertainments across a dizzying array of platforms, but in our exuberance we just didn’t notice that most of it was not very good.

Let’s face it, the good times are only really great in retrospect. As one who lived through the 1980s boomtimes in London, I recall them with some relish. On closer inspection, though, I can dimly remember the frustrations and problems too. What on earth did I do with all that money?

As a certain French general used to say, every weakness in your position can be turned to your advantage. That’s the spirit in which I approach the coming era of austerity.

How about you?