Why King trumps Carney in the battle of the governors

If they were former Manchester United players, Booker prize nominees, or members of Oasis, the acrimony and arguments might be fairly run of the mill. Among current and former Governors of the Bank of England it is, to put it mildly, a little unusual. And yet Mark Carney now finds himself under sustained attack from his immediate predecessor Mervyn King over how it should handle our departure from the European Union. And in that battle of governors there can surely only be one winner – and it isn’t the incumbent.

In a piece for Bloomberg, King, who served with distinction at the Bank from 2003 to 2013, takes apart Theresa’s May’s exit deal in ferocious detail. It is, he argues, a betrayal of Britain that leaves the country worse off than either leaving or staying, the worst of all possible worlds. That we have reached this point is, in his view, a crisis of leadership on a par with the 1940s or the 1970s.