‘I thank the Lord I’ve been blessed / With more than my share of happiness.” No disrespect to the great Ken Dodd, and least of all in the week after his 90th birthday, but that particular claim to distinction may not, it turns out, be evidence based – in fact there are figures to prove it.

Building on an original initiative by David Cameron, who has yet, incidentally, to acknowledge the scale of his debt to the creator of the tickling stick, the Office for National Statistics has just announced its latest happiness, or “personal wellbeing” research. In the period between June 2016 and June 2017 – taking in the referendum, Trump’s election and the deepening threat from Jacob Rees-Mogg – it emerges that the British became the happiest they have been since 2011, when the ONS began measuring wellbeing. Respondents reported an average 7.7 out of 10 for life satisfaction.

As he sits in his shepherd’s hut, planning a new career in China-UK investment, Mr Cameron can certainly reflect that he – and an influential school of happiness experts – was right about one thing: there’s more to life than money. Maybe money is even, as George Osborne always suspected, bad for happiness? At least, in the wrong hands. While our national happiness was reportedly increasing, the ONS itself points out that real household disposable income fell for the fourth successive quarter, “and for the first time in two years, consumers reported a worsening perception of their own financial situation”.

Maybe there is something, after all, in, to borrow the technical jargon, the Ken Dodd paradox: “I’ve got no silver and I’ve got no gold / Just a whole lot of happiness in my soul.”

Could there even be a scientific case for making struggling people a bit poorer, since, if they even notice, it might cheer them up? Cameron wanted the happiness research, after all, to “help government work out, with evidence, the best ways of trying to help to improve people’s wellbeing”. His successor can now build on ONS statistics showing that, for “feeling that what you do in life is worthwhile”, the British now rate a practically Nordic 7.9 out of 10. Very high levels – scores of 9 or 10 – of life satisfaction, worthwhile and happiness ratings have also increased, while, compared with 2012, more people reported feeling – notwithstanding authoritative predictions of Brexit-induced ruin – very low anxiety.

In the circumstances, next time he sings about having “more than my share of happiness”, Mr Dodd might want to quantify his claim, bearing in mind his data can only be, like all hedonic findings, subjectively measured and he should, anyway, factor in his status as a revered national figure. Then again, some revered national figures are consumed by anxiety that they will one day not be quite so well loved, or, worse, replaced. Maybe he’s just easily pleased? “I can see it in the sunshine,” he sings, “I breathe it in the rain.” Before the government bases any policy decisions on a possible correlation between precipitation and levels of self-reported wellbeing it’s worth noting that the same set of UK-wide statistics found happiness levels in Scotland and Wales to be stubbornly unimproved.

If the release of these figures has not exactly reopened, as David Cameron once rhapsodised, “a national debate about how together we can build a better life”, they were certainly welcomed, in some quarters, as a valuable resource for divisive score-settling. “Quit Remoaning” is, for instance, how the official statistics on wellbeing were reported by a triumphant Daily Express: “Life satisfaction has reached a record high since the UK voted to leave the EU.”

For responsible policymakers, there are, of course, more complex implications. The case for more evictions, more food banks, more xenophobia and longer NHS waiting lists, all of which also coincided with the positive national moodswing, must be as persuasive, from these figures, as their scientific underpinning for Brexit. Unless, as the ONS itself speculates, the improved wellbeing was caused by something quite different. It doesn’t have any way, from this data, of knowing. In a section tentatively headed, “what may explain these results”, the statisticians do note that political uncertainties, along with serious terror attacks, could have pointed to a different happiness outcome. Maybe, they think, “some of the increases in wellbeing ratings may be explained through the improvement in certain economic indicators within the UK”. Employment, for example, was high and GDP per head improved.

What is striking, in this confusion about possible causes, is the analysts’ readiness to attribute the unexpectedly good mood to a cause as crude as money.

Always critical to his case for official happiness research was Cameron’s insistence that something as mysterious as wellbeing can’t be all about “the bottom line”, that after a certain point wealth doesn’t affect happiness – you can only be in one fleece-lined shepherd’s hut at a time, right? – that there were, conveniently for his government, untold non-material routes to general happiness, such as talking up marriage or droning on about the big society you’ll create on the cheap.

Six years on, perplexed by spirits untroubled by a widely resented referendum result and its chaotic aftermath, the ONS wonders, effectively, if it’s because people are in denial about a repeatedly predicted economic outcome: that of disaster. What nobody seems inclined to conclude, however, is that people wouldn’t be made predictably unhappy, whatever they might now say, by restrictions on their spending or lifestyle.

As Edward Skidelsky, co-author of How Much Is Enough? writes, in an academic critique of happiness surveys: “Either they tally with prior estimates of human happiness, in which case they seem to be redundant, or else they do not, in which case they seem to be flawed.”

True, we may all, since 2011, have got steadily less materialistic and more mindful, like the agile happiness enthusiast Lord Seldon, a leading advocate of standing on one’s head. Maybe luxury goods manufacturers are wasting their time here: Tiffany will have to melt down its British allocation of silver yo-yos, withdraw its range of “everyday objects”, and apologise for so grotesquely taking the piss.

It’s also possible that underlying Britain’s apparent beatitude is not so much a recognition that Cameron is correct, like his favourite happiness scholars, to downgrade the importance of money, but the cultural pressure to act positive.

What could be registering, when people profess themselves happy in a country leaning strongly towards self-combustion, is the victory of the defiant “when life gives you lemons” philosophy we are all exhorted, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued, to adopt. “There is no kind of problem or obstacle,” she finds, “for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure.”

And never more absurdly, surely, than to Brexit. “A triumph of optimism”, offers Rees-Mogg. Going “incredibly well”, lies David Davis. “I’m positive and optimistic”, babbles Theresa May. In a country that sets the satisfaction bar that low, maybe the new happiness findings are what you might expect: meaningless.