If only Mervyn King showed more concern for us than he does for his tattered reputation

Oh Calamity!

There’s something distinctly All Gas and Gaiters about the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Before the credit crunch he used to look like a smug Church of England bishop about to tuck into a plate of roast swan accompanied by some rather agreeable wines. Now he looks as if he’s just been informed that his Archdeacon has been arrested for rogering choir-boys. You can almost hear him crying “Oh calamity!”

This week, the old booby has been warning us that, economically, things are even more bleak than we had imagined. And he shared with us the astonishing insight  that the Eurozone is “tearing itself apart” and that this might have a bit of an impact on our economic prospects.

Well thanks for that, Merv – really useful.

Far as I can tell, our main economic problems are fourfold: banks won’t lend money because they’re not confident of getting it back; businesses won’t invest because they have no confidence in the economy;  because many of our major trading partners are in an equal or even worse financial mess, they’re not buying as much from us as we need them to; we have a trillion pounds worth of IOUs issued by Gordon Brown on our behalf to pay back, and the interest on the debt is running at about £1 Billion a week (I'm no economic expert, of course, but, then, neither, evidently, is Sir Mervyn King.) 

So how does the Governor of the Bank of England decide to restore confidence and stability to the market? By telling us that everything’s even worse than we’d imagined. Well, that should do the trick!

The interesting question is why the incompetent old twit would do something quite so stupid. One answer is that he often does very stupid things. First, he managed to miss all the warning signs that Britain’s banks were suicidally over-stretched – which was pretty dumb of him – and then his answer to that crisis was to print oodles of new money, which means more inflation, meaning that those of us stupid enough to save for our old age are being punished for carefully husbanding our resources, while the feckless idiots who got us into this mess in the first place are being rewarded with rock-bottom interest rates. Mervyn - you're a star!

And now, when he should be moving heaven and earth to help the economy back on its feet, Sir Mervyn’s main concern seems to be to ensure that he doesn’t go down in history as the blithering idiot who got it wrong twice in a row.

Look, Merv, we couldn’t care less whether you ultimately shoulder a major part of the blame for failing to spot the massive economic iceberg we were steaming towards in 2008. We don’t give a toss whether you go down as the worst governor in the history of the Bank of England. And just because the SS Britannia got severely holed below the waterline on your watch, running around shrieking “We’re all doomed!” every time you  spot another iceberg won’t do anything to restore your reputation – when the Euro collapses, we’re not going to turn round and say, “Wow, that Mervyn King saw this coming – what a genius!”

I’ve no idea why you've been allowed to remain captain at the Bank, but I do know that we – the passengers it was your duty to protect – fully realise that there‘s a Eurozone disaster in the making and that it could have a severe impact on us: what we’d like you to do – just this once – is to tell us what the hell we’re all supposed to do about it.

Because, you see, this isn’t about you, old boy – it’s about us.