Could Haldane have helped save us from inflation?

Would Andy Haldane, the economist who left the Bank of England to run the Royal Society of Arts, have made a better governor than Andrew Bailey? You might be thinking that Daffy Duck would have made a better fist than Bailey of combatting the cost of living crisis. But seriously, Haldane was an outsider (backed by this column) in the race won by Mark Carney in 2012, and Dominic Cummings reportedly wanted him to follow Carney in 2020. He’s a brilliant real-world observer and it’s poignant to know that, though he warned Monetary Policy Committee colleagues early last year to brace for inflation, it has ‘surpassed my worst expectations’. He thinks the Bank has been damagingly slow in its responses and that we’re heading for ‘a massive shock’ precipitated by the need for sharply higher interest rates.

But ‘I’m really the wrong person to ask about why they got it wrong’, he told the Sunday Telegraph, and there’s a sense in which Haldane is a natural backbencher – never put to the test, as Bailey has been, of frontline leadership.