The career of Mervyn King, now Lord King of Lothbury, has been played out in gilt-edged establishment institutions: the University of Cambridge, Harvard, the Bank of England (where he was governor from 2003 to 2013) and now the House of Lords, where he sits as a crossbencher. But King is far harder to “place” than his CV suggests. He likes to put complex ideas into plain language, often using sporting metaphors, a characteristic of English anti-pretentiousness. Yet his Englishness is not so deep that he hides his intellectualism, his delight in ideas and the energy they provide. The witty don, the technocrat, the pure intellectual: each strand seems equally central.
We are having morning coffee in King’s library at his house in east Kent and discussing his new book, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy (Little, Brown). It is nearly three years since he left the Bank of England and, not untypically for someone who has left high office, he looks as though he spends more time outdoors these days. Perhaps less typically, he seems to be enjoying his life of freedom and thinking.
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