Everything that happened to the Footsie this week happened in yesterday's last hour.

The British market had seen a multi-billion-dollar telecoms alliance, some very depressing industrial confidence data, extreme moves by Britain's biggest companies and a £400m portfolio adjustment in the previous four days.

But at 3.30pm yesterday afternoon, the FTSE 100 index was virtually unchanged over the week.

It seemed that a fixation on next week's meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee had frozen any broad asset-allocation decisions.

Then, the index turned off rapidly to show a loss of -73.7 at 5,837 by the close of trading - a net downswing of 93.1 points. The FTSE 250 fell 2.7 to 5,482.7, but the SmallCap rose 5.2 to 2,472.5

It was a surprising denouement to a day which many dealers had foreseen ending on a strong note.

London opened in the wake of an 111-point rise by Wall Street on Thursday and a reasonable performance from leading Asian equity markets.

There was no economic data from Britain to latch on to and the market was up in early trading. It shrugged off a big results-related fall in Lloyds TSB even though the slide in the bank's share price was worth more than 20 points off the index.