OBITUARY: THE DEATH OF MR. FEELGOOD

The death has been reported of “Mr Feelgood” after a long debilitating illness. He finally passed away last week, losing the will to live after reading the latest IMF assessment on the UK economy.

My Feelgood leaves a welfare state, extensive universal benefit commitments, an abandoned home and colossal debts.

It is thought an enfeebled annuity and relentlessly rising energy bills drained him of the last vestiges of hope.

Mr Feelgood rose to prominence in the mid and late 1980s when he played a vital part in the thumping electoral victories of Mrs Thatcher.

He was widely seen driving a white van – hence giving rise to the political phenomenon “White Van Man”. WVM was widely thought to have played a critical role in the success of Mrs Thatcher.

Throughout the mid and late 1980s Mr Feelgood was borne aloft by rising mortgage borrowing and the boom in home ownership, together with privatised share offers which, for a time, bestowed a glowing aura of prosperity. The prospect of a dynamic, successful share-owning democracy seemed to have arrived.

But the pleasing ambrosia of faux prosperity was swept away by the sharp recession of 1990-92. While short in terms of official duration, the shock of this downturn, caused in large part by our membership of the European Exchange Rate mechanism – a policy cheered on by all three main parties - , was felt for several years.

Particularly threatening for Mr Feelgood was the fall in house prices and the onset of negative equity, when millions found that the value of their home fell below the amount of the outstanding mortgage.

This lingered round until 1995-96. It was around this time that search parties were sent out to see if Mr Feelgood was still alive.

Indeed he was. But by now he was driving a new car. Hence the rise of the new phenomenon: “Mondeo Man”. You could tell Mondeo Man by a vulgar sticker about John Major’s  underpants on the bumper and a New Labour rose.

Mr Feelgood’s wealth soared into the stratosphere with the internet and information technology boom of the late 1990s. He sold his fuddy-duddy privatisation shares such as British Gas and British Telecom and piled into ventures such as Boo.com, Xerxes Zen Technologies and Atlantic Telecom.

By the end of the decade Mr Feelgood was insisting to his stockbroker that the old economy was dead and that he should only buy stocks with the letters ‘X’ or  ‘Z’ in the name. To mark his status as a new economy rising star, he bought a Porsche.

But as the fireworks to greet the new century soared from Mr Feelgood’s designer garden, the great tech bubble was about to burst.

 Mr Feelgood suffered huge losses on his investments The stock market tumbled and in 2003, when the FTSE100 Index had slumped from 6,990 to 3,300, he pulled out of New Labour fund raising dinners and vowed never to buy shares direct again. Instead he went for safety first split capital investment trusts.

The early years of the Noughties were painful for Mr Feelgood. The stock market was slow to recover. And his split capital trust shares had collapsed to nothing.

But in due course, he bounced back, just as he had always done. He piled into the buy-to-let market, with a particular penchant for one bedroom flats in provincial cities.  As his next door neighbour was an investment bank derivatives trader doing phenomenally well, Mr Feelgood bought heavily into bank shares. Seeing the success of his neighbour, how could he possibly go wrong?

By this stage he didn’t much care who he voted for but feigned support for the Greens as he was collecting big tax breaks on his private equity wind farm investments.

By 2007 Mr Feelgood was more prosperous than he had ever been. He held a clutch of residential properties bought with the help of self-certification mortgages and an ebullient bank manager urging him to expand into commercial property.

But, as was often the case in the life of Mr Feelgood, what went up came down – and with shattering force.

It was the following year, with the demise of Lehman Brothers and the share crashes of HBoS and Royal Bank of Scotland, that Mr Feelgood, a regular fixture on the social scene, was no longer to be seen at his usual haunts.

His property portfolio slumped, his bank shares crashed, the Porsche was seen in a car auction and Mr Feelgood put his house on the market. That was three years ago but he withdrew it last year after failing to attract a single offer.

Mr Feelgood was last seen at a social enterprise organic canapés and homemade wine evening. He gave a short talk on his new business venture - selling bamboo lounge jackets and underwear made out of forestry detritus. “We’re all in this together!” he exhorted, brandishing his NHS mobility stick.

That was in 2011. No subsequent sightings were reported.

The funeral will be held at the council crematorium.

No flowers by request.