THOUGH it is hard to find anyone who is bullish about Britain’s growth prospects, economy-watchers have been consistently surprised by the weakness of official figures. The latest set, published on July 25th, showed that GDP in the second quarter fell by 0.7%, a far bigger drop than the 0.2% decline forecast by analysts. The figures suggest the economy has shrunk by a cumulative 1.4% over the past three quarters and is now smaller than when the coalition government took office in May 2010. All this adds to the pressures on George Osborne, the increasingly forlorn chancellor of the exchequer.

The scale of the surprise suggests two alternatives: either business is much weaker than even the gloomiest forecasters had feared, or the preliminary estimates of GDP are so flawed they are not a reliable guide to the state of the economy. Which is it?

It is usually unwise to dismiss information merely because it does not conform to expectations: it might be telling you something you did not know. The trouble in the euro zone is worsening. Even Germany’s economy, the region’s mightiest, seem to be faltering, so the British GDP figures may be an early sign of broader misery. A startling drop in construction output was on its own enough to explain half the fall in GDP. This probably owes something to the miserably wet weather, but it may also reflect cuts in public-sector investment.

Yet the data sceptics have a stronger case than usual. The extra bank holiday in June to mark the queen’s Diamond Jubilee meant there was one less working day than normal in the quarter. This is a rare event, so the statisticians make no special adjustment for it. Indeed, because they have little hard economic data for June, they had to use informed guesswork to estimate how much output fell in the month. The Bank of England had guessed the extra holiday would cut around 0.5% from second-quarter output, and boost the third-quarter figures by roughly the same amount (with a bump from the Olympic games). Analysts had factored this kind of adjustment into their forecasts, yet were still way off the official GDP estimate.

What led them astray were signs of economic life in other figures. Business surveys suggest the economy has been chugging along. The purchasing managers’ surveys compiled by Markit, a research firm, suggest the economy grew steadily in the first half of the year. John Cridland, the head of the CBI, an employers’ group, said the “overwhelming view” of businesses is that the economy is flat, rather than shrinking. There are some notable bright spots. Britain’s aerospace industry, the world’s second-biggest, is busy filling orders. The car industry is bucking the downward trend in most of Europe (see article). Britain recently posted its first quarterly trade surplus in cars since the 1970s.