UK economy: UK may already be in recession, with inflation twice as high as claimed, says Major

John Major yesterday mingled "human sympathy" for Gordon Brown's embattled prime ministership with a warning that Britain may already be in a recession, with inflation "between 8% and 10%" - more than double the official figure.

In a rare public appearance, the former Conservative prime minister, who inherited 14% interest rates and 9.5% inflation from Margaret Thatcher in 1990, admitted that current economic circumstances were not as bad as those in the recession he presided over - the price the country paid for Thatcher's 1980s boom, he admitted. But his sympathy for Brown - markedly kinder than he often was towards Tony Blair - did not extend to fully endorsing No 10's claim that current problems are due to imported global forces, notably rising food and commodity prices, especially oil.

Asked by the BBC's Andrew Marr if he felt glee at Brown's problems, he replied: "No, no, no, no. No. Well, I hope it's human sympathy. I have very strong disagreements with many of the things politically that Gordon Brown has done. But he's doing an extremely difficult job.

"He's doing it in extremely difficult circumstances. They may be partially of his making. But it's not helpful to the country or anybody else to have some of the comment about him that there has been."

Major singled out Brown's decision as chancellor to separate the regulatory functions of the Bank of England as partly responsible for rising inflation and the crisis at Northern Rock, and endorsed David Cameron's "rainy day" complaint that Labour had not put aside money during the good years.

"They certainly can't cut taxes because they have such a big fiscal deficit. They can't increase public spending because they've already spent the money we would normally use," Major told Marr.

"It's quite extraordinary that over 10 years in which the world has had the most benign economic circumstances for a very long time, we have run up such a huge fiscal deficit." He said the UK's trade deficit was "about between 50 and 60 times higher than it was in 1997".

But what may be Major's most damning contribution was his support for claims that neither of the two official measures of inflation, the consumer price index (CPI) and the retail prices index (RPI), now reflects real inflation as it affects ordinary people on average incomes, because the CPI excludes key items such as housing.

"I would say inflation is probably double the RPI figure, so we're between 8% and 10%," Major claimed.