‘It is hard to justify the Bank of England misleading the market’

Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey

Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England

(Image credit: Tolga Akmen/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

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1. The Bank of England’s inflation rate stunt
2. Boris Johnson’s next problem is his own furious MPs
3. Young people like me have made history this Cop26 ‘youth day’ – now it’s your turn
4. Piers Morgan’s departure left Good Morning Britain with an identity crisis Richard Madeley can’t solve
5. Prince Charles has finally won

By The best columns

published 5 November 2021

1. The Bank of England’s inflation rate stunt

Matthew Lynn for The Spectator

“In many ways, the current governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey is an upgrade on his high-profile predecessor Mark Carney,” writes Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. “And yet, in the most important respect, he is turning out to be very similar.” Bailey “is constantly threatening to raise interest rates, and then backing off at the last moment”. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee has this week voted to hold rates, after multiple hints they would be raised. “What is hard to justify is misleading the market,” he says, and this latest episode was “the same kind of stunt that Mark Carney used to pull on the markets”. With his latest decision, “Bailey is turning into the new Carney – and eventually that will start to damage his credibility”.

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“This government has learnt how to U-turn quickly in recent months but what we’ve just seen was spectacular, even by its standards,” writes James Forsyth in The Times. Tory MPs are “furious” because they “compromised themselves” to protect Owen Paterson “only to reverse their position only hours later”. Downing Street has “misread the mood of the parliamentary party”, The Spectator’s political editor says, and angry backbenchers are now Boris Johnson’s next big problem. The prime minister effectively heads a “coalition” government in which “veteran MPs sit for traditional Tory seats, while the newer intakes are more likely to represent constituencies that have been Labour until recently”. It will take “careful party management“ to hold his parliamentary party together, he adds. And that is ”not the forte of the Downing Street operation”.

“Cop26 has failed to successively implement adequate climate measures, decade after decade,” writes Scarlett Westbrook for The Independent, “instead choosing to pass policies that line the pockets of fossil fuel corporations that are tearing our planet and livelihoods apart”. The climate activist argues that “the real force for change at Cop isn’t in the conference hall, but on the streets of the host city”, where, as “world leaders squabble over semantics”, thousands of young people “have gathered together to unite for climate justice”. Today’s strike for “global climate justice” clarifies “the true catalyst for radical and idiosyncratic change that young people are”, she says. “Another world is possible – and we won’t stop our efforts until we attain it.”

“When Piers Morgan stormed off the Good Morning Britain set and out of the show for good in March, some of us were ecstatic,” writes Kuba Shand-Baptiste on the i news site. But it created a problem for the producers, namely “who was going to give the British public their daily dose of fiery debate”. She is “struggling to see how ITV will fill his shoes”, adding that Morgan’s “professional trolling” has left behind a “gammon-sized hole” that cannot be filled by the “watered-down” Richard Madeley. “What the show needs to think about is what it actually wants to contribute to public debate,” she adds. “It’s easy to live up to an objective of button-pushing if you have an unscrupulous, yet charismatic troublemaker as the focus of your show“, but ”without him, you need a different USP”.

“Prince Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the ‘puppet of sinister gurus’, dismal, a ‘sower of division and contention’, and ‘way too grand’,” writes Will Lloyd for Unherd. And that was just one article in The Spectator. Recalling how “everyone from Diana to The Sun and foreigners” would all mock the heir to the throne, Lloyd says that “finally, Charles is respected, admired, and – most shockingly of all – listened to”. His long-standing concern about climate change meant “the world’s leaders saluted him” during the Cop26 conference. The “dissident Prince” is the toast of the town and “accepted at last”, Lloyd adds, because “scientific expertise” now “agrees with him about hedges and bees”.

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