His members happily pushed mortgages on us. Now he wants rates to rise. What sort of comedian is this Coogan guy?

Hands up who's heard of Michael Coogan? No, not the Alan Partridge creator, though some of his statements over the years do appear inept enough for the fictitious TV interviewer.

Michael Coogan is director-general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders, a trade association for building societies and banks operating in the mortgage market. It is in no way, shape or form a consumers' association. Its role, in its own words, is to 'establish and maintain a favourable operating environment in the residential mortgage and related housing markets in the UK'.

Favourable for whom? It doesn't say, but it seems fair to assume it is a PR front for the lenders, aimed primarily at encouraging people to buy more mortgages. And what's wrong with that? Governments have for the past 20 years encouraged us to buy our homes, increase our stake in society, and so on.

They have all chosen to ignore what happens when the housing market crashes. After the terrible problems of a dozen years ago, which left thousands of buyers bankrupt and homeless, we have gone down the same road again - driven by Coogan and his members, the very mortgage lenders who lent money willy-nilly in the 1980s then repossessed all those homes.

But what is really worrying is a statement he put out last month - Coogan's Bluff seems a suitable title - calling on the Bank of England to raise interest rates to stop property prices from spiralling out of control. Of course, this was fatuous in that they are already out of control. Worse than the fatuity, though, was the disingenuousness of it. Coogan's statement was an attempt at pre-emptive buck-passing, and as cynical a ploy as I've seen.

If Coogan and his members had been serious about wanting to rein in prices, they would have restrained their lending long ago. It is not as if rampant rises are a brand new phenomenon. Over the past seven or eight years, prices in London have risen two-, three- or even four-fold, and the rest of the country isn't far behind.

But lenders threw caution to the winds.Their call for Bank of England intervention is the surest sign yet that they now anticipate the worst and are trying to cover their backs.

Coogan's members will be keenly aware that consumers have been borrowing record amounts on the back of their paper property profits. That, and unprecedented levels of remortgaging, is what has kept the spending boom going far longer than reason dictated.

So when the property crash comes, homeowners will realise that they have vast credit-card bills that are not supported nearly so well as they thought by the equity in their homes. Even those not squeezed into negative equity will feel poor and stop spending. And Britain will feel the effects of a full-blown recession.

And it will get worse before it gets better, because so many households rely on two salaries to fund their mortgages (the average home now costs five times the average wage). With tens of thousands of layoffs a real possibility, many households may fall into arrears serious enough to trigger a new wave of repossessions.

And all this credit has been extended by the same institutions as have been selling the mortgages: Coogan's members. They are rightly terrified of the opprobrium that will be heaped upon them in the wake of such a calamity. No wonder Coogan called on the Government last November to improve state benefits for borrowers who fall into financial difficulties.

But maybe I'm wrong and Coogan isn't cynically attempting to protect his paymasters. After all, there is considerable evidence that he is quite simply wrong a lot of the time.

In June 2000, he said: 'The increase in transactions during the late 1980s was a one-off event.' In August last year, he said homeowners were in a good position to cope with an economic slump because low interest rates meant mortgages were affordable. Does his recent demand for base rate rises, mean he now wants mortgages to be unaffordable?

At the same time, he said the housing boom had peaked, and predicted property price rises of 3 per cent this year. The current (annualised) rate is 16 per cent. Last November, he said of buy-to-let properties: 'There is the potential for them to make good long-term returns.' Yields on buy-to-let have fallen from a high of 10 per cent to a current 3 per cent or even less.

What will Coogan say next? I can't wait, but in the meantime I'll be talking urgently to my estate agent.