Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Is Britain heading for a hard landing?

Is the British economy about to fall off a cliff? That's not the story told by the latest GDP figures, which show that, though activity is definitely slowing, the economy was still a robust 2.5 per cent bigger in the first quarter than a year earlier.

Yet my City lunch table tells me there was a pronounced fall-off in activity in March, not confined to the housing and financial sectors. Forward-looking survey data seems to confirm observations of a marked slowdown, as do Sir Martin Sorrell's latest musings on the shape of the advertising industry.

A hard landing for the UK economy continues to seem unlikely, but, as I've been writing for some months now, the odds are shortening all the time.